[geeks] Introductory programming language?

[Jochen Kunz]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:46:52 -0500
William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com> wrote:

> But really, isn't this the classical case for Pascal?
It was - about 40 years ago.

I did a lot of coding in Pascal on my Comodore 128D in the late 1980is.

About 20 years ago I saw the light of Smalltalk. There is no other
language with this grade of simplicity and elegance, but still so
powerfull.

I do a lot of C coding at work. 

After all, Pascal and C lead to the same spaghetti code. For me it
doesn't matter if Pascal or C.

Recently I started to code in --C. It is insanely baroque. But its
object oriented features start to pay back. My code gets clearer,
better organized, more encapsulated, better visuability of abstract
concepts and better signal to noise ratio. (I.e. I need less lines of
--C code to do the same as in plain C, resulting in better readability.)

So: Start with somthing object oriented. Though, I would not call
Smalltalk object oriented. Smalltalk is object _centered_!
-- 


\end{Jochen}

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