Good Starter Language? (was Re: REALBasic and OpenAL)

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Thursday 31 March 2005 01:39 pm, Leo Mauler wrote:

> If not BASIC, then what would be the programming
> language of choice for the beginner?

I agree with Jason that a good grounding in shell scripting is the place to 
start.  From there, branch out into a good understanding of awk and sed.

After that, I wouldn't endorse his recommendation of obscure niche languages 
like Python and Ruby.  I frankly think those will prove to be relative dead 
ends, because sysadmins are only willing to maintain a certain limited number 
of languages on any given system.

A very useful next step might be to learn PHP, and how to integrate HTML with 
MySQL using PHP.  Running a webserver is a fairly common task, which will 
inevitably get you into PHP, and if you can fix the many broken PHP scripts 
available, so much the better.

Next I would recommend perl because it is such a useful language, and there's 
a lot of example code around to learn from.  It wasn't really designed for 
software development, but like RPG for extracting, sorting, and reporting.   
(Program(able?) Extraction and Reporting Language, after all).  Like Bash, 
sed, and awk it can do things that you might actually want to do with your 
computer for yourself.

After that, if you're serious, there's no excuse not to get into one of the 
various C flavors.  People have been writing code for PC's in C now for a 
couple of decades, and it doesn't look like someone's going to suddenly sweep 
it all away with some new fad.  If you understand C, you'll understand most 
of the OS coding projects that are around today.

Assembler is cool.  We used to have a saying in the Big Iron days "I can't 
means I don't know enough assembler".  Still, it tends to be platform 
specific, and rather than put the effort into it I'd work on mastering your 
chosen C flavor(s).  System370 Assembler is pretty useless when you're coding 
for a PC.

(Yes, I know there's an emulator available.)