Re: Programming?

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

>I've never seen anything in or about apl before.  However, I see
>nothing wrong with c as a first language provided you get a very good
>book that explains concepts correctly.
There are a number of languages that have been mentioned on this thread
that I have not really heard of, or seen before either, so it's not too
surprising.

>Of course, you're reading a message from a guy that started on an
>ibm-360 in it's assembly language.  It really scared heck out of me,
>but I guarantee you i learned programming logic real fast....
That's right, and the thread was started by someone who asked what the
BEST programming labguage would be for learning about programming. You
(and others who have done the same) put yourself (or were put) into a 
kind of "sink or swim" position, which is probably not the best learning
situation for most people, and almost never encountered for personal
programing (whaich was something else mentioned).

>I don't think that C is as dangerous as assembly language to start with
>as a first language....
You are right,to the extent that IBM 360 assembler ran on machines that
really protected themselves from silly failures. If you wrote someting in
BAL (aka 360 Assembler), and ran it as a normal user, OS would protect
things quite well. If you ran priviledged, you could drop a mainframe
like an elephant hit with a howitzer, but no systems manager in his right
mind would run trainee-generated BAL on a production mainframe without
careful inspection and trial runs in a more protected environment.

In C on a PC, under DOS, you can crash things so dead you'll have to power
down, then up. I know. I did it. Several times.

My C has improved since then, at least according to SOME people! :)

>but I'll always thank God I did start in assembly language, because it
>forced me to learn programming logic real well.
Perhaps so, but if you had started at another point, you may well have
developed better notions about higher-level design, building algorithms,
and when to break things up. It is DIFFICULT to gain this knowledge from 
assembly, if only because the student is generally TOO CLOSE to the
sepcifics of what's going on to be able to comprehend the whole thing.

>Because of the teacher I had, it is now possible for me to borrow a
>book on tape on a programming language, and understand the concepts of
>it, and teach myself the language.
I would claim that the quality of the teacher, approach, textbook, and
other source material has alot to do with how successful you will be. 

Your book reccomendations are welcome, and a clear explanation of pointers
is frequently lacking in courses that teach C.

Given two programming languages of approximately equal complexity, type
and level of abstraction, the student ought to go for the one with the
better instructor, textbook, and other supporting materials. Exactly how
you can know this in advance is not clear to me, some of this is a
question of taste.

                                                              Cheers!
                                                             ---> RGB <---