[rescue] flamewar question: Perl

[Greg]

> BASIC, Pascal, Pilot, Forth, FORTRAN, C, COBOL, 370 Assembler, Perl, Java, PHP
> - that's my progression.

BASIC, Forth, Pascal, Ada (introductory language at my college, darn it),
68k assembly, C, C++, Perl, SPARC assembly, Scheme, ...

> Introductary courses at MIT are not the same as intro courses at the local
> community college, remember. How many folks arrive at MIT and *never*
> programmed computers? Anything counts, Logo, BASIC, C, Pilot (!), etc...

My understanding, which could be wrong as I've never been to MIT, is that
MIT uses it to teach programming to the students that have never programmed
before (not everyone at MIT is a programmer, apparently, they must teach
other things too :-).

The point is that Scheme introduces you to programming concepts without the
language getting into the way.  Those concepts and skills can then be
applied to other languages.  Having explored Scheme practically last in my
progression, I realized that it would've been much better to have learned to
solve programming problems in Scheme first.  The entire Scheme programming
language is described in a 50 page document (r5rs), have you seen the
standards for C or C++?  The language is easy, the programming techniques
and problem solving skills are the important part.

Very few people are going to make money programming in Scheme, lots of
people would be better programmers in other languages having learned Scheme.

-greg