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landonmkelsey
9-Sep-09 10:52am
ultimately pick a language with a future (unless you are independently wealthy)
you'll find few jobs available in
Visual Basic
Fortran
pascal/delphi
PL2
Java will soon fade
Lisp/yacc/lex only as a side effort
C# and C++ require prodigious study. If your main drive in life is talking and watching TV and hanging at the game shack, C++ and C# are NOT for you!
do not use kernigan and ritchie to learn C! Too much self serving double talk!
great authors :
C: Herbert Schildt
C++ Bruce Eckel (free books download), Ivor Horton, Stephen Prata
C# visit the bookstore, sit down and read to find the best choice...be sure you have a 30 day return policy
landonmkelsey
9-Sep-09 10:55am
sorry about the double post but the first submission hung with a "problem post now" message so I rewrote the message
zanago
7-Oct-09 10:24pm
My first language was VB,and now I prefer C++ to others,because I think C++ is more powerful than other languages,C++ is the best.
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ibm battery
mhcox
31-Oct-09 11:47am
I started out with Algol (I'm dating myself :-). Then Pascal, Fortran (not recommended for a first language), C, and C++. More recently I've dabbled with Python and Perl and learned to appreciate the benefits (and drawbacks) of dynamic languages. So ...
For a beginner starting out I'd recommend a dynamic language (probably Python) to provide immediate feedback to the student, but eventually for a beginner to become an expert (not every beginner needs to become and expert if they're not considering programming as a possible profession), exposure to an object-oriented, statically typed language is necessary. Java and C++ come to mind. My preference would be C++ because of it's breadth of use from embedded to enterprise (yes I know Java can be used in embedded development, but I'm talking about hardware environments where hardware resources are scarce: memory measured in 10's of K and processor speeds measured in 10's of MHz.
One very recent (read bleeding-edge) language that holds promise is Cobra (http://cobra-language.com). Within the same language you can program dynamically and statically (although I'm not sure you can do both in the same source file or program), it's object-oriented, and much much more. See http://cobra-language.com/docs/why for more details.
Mike
risnosnick
2-Nov-09 9:43pm
Pascal.
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Best first language for young developers?
If you were approached by a teenager and asked what was the best language to learn programming, how would you answer? Would you suggest a mainstream general-purpose language like C++ or Java, a dynamic language like Ruby or Perl, or perhaps a functional language like Scheme?
Myself, I lean toward Python as a learning language these days, but let's hear what you have to say.