Thread

hahaha, you all so fanatics….

luckily i don’t put COBOL, FORTRAND, PASCAL 😛

Not fanatic. Wise.

Been there, done that. From Assembler to Pascal to Cobol to Basic (the original IBM ROM basic) to C(++) to VB.

Guess that shows my age…  :ohh:

Anyone who wants to use PHP as a “learning” language should start like this:

http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20070808.htm

Then break the “rules” as one learns more about PHP. Some rules will be broken very quickly, like “never interact with a database” and some are outdated like “use magic quotes” but I’m assuming a very, very basic level here since the op says “never programmed before.”

Security is a tremendously complex issue… for example how many people protect against null byte attack, double encoding and all 70 ways to encode < in UTF-8? Definitely not someone starting to learn. Now no framework protects against such attacks natively, but if you start with other languages for example Java you will run into ESAPI and be aware of the difficulty of security. Meanwhile start with PHP and perhaps one thinks that xss_clean() and ActiveRecord are enough to stop all attacks. It is not 😉.

I don’t think it’s the greatest advice but I will say 1) JavaScript is moderately interesting because it has that key attribute that it is “fun” (ie, you can easily create interesting things)(if VB were still around, I would say the same thing) and 2) C is interesting because it still has the best learning book: Kernigan & Ritchie…short and sweet.

VB IS still around. It’s not bad for someone who would just want to create Windows forms and see results very quickly. It’s a good RAD environment. C# is better than VB though IMO.

Whats the best programm to learn spanish??
can you tell me 3 of them??
would be very nice!!

K.G

Big Wolf

I start from turbo basic and then turbo pascal, turbo c, visual c++, java, and last php. I think don’t be fanatic. You must strong on algorithmics

I think that Pascal is a very goog language to start with programming.
Because is hardly typefied.

God bless you.

Alejo

I actually learned Java as my first programming language and I have to say DON’T teach it as the first language. 10 years later, I finally got round to sitting down, spending a week learning C/C++ and finding it far more useful.

C is the mother language for many other languages. Taking the concepts you learn in C and translating them to other languages is easier than the other way around. You also get exposed to core concepts like memory management. Java is not only a relatively abstracted language, but also rather inflexible for students who want to go into other areas of computing such as computer graphics and game development.

When I was at University, they only taught Java and databases (really crappy cs program) and it was pretty useless IMO. Learning C/C++ first would have set us all up for a better career in computing…. I hear teachers always say that teaching Java is easier than C/C++ but I generally feel it let’s the students down.

My 2 cents. 😊

L

It al depends on what you want to archieve by teaching someone a programming language.

If it is to allow them to find a job easily, than you would probably pick another language then if you would teach someone the theoretical principles of programming (which I still find more important than anything else, and can be done even with an artificial language, or something nasty like Pascal).

I’ve spend over 10 years of my life fixing other people’s code, and I strongly feel *EVERY* programmer should be theoretically trained, and if not, get his hands chopped off. The simple principe of defining the conditions in which your code/method/procedure/method needs to operate, and then test all conditions, including the cases around your condition, is beyond most programmers today.

For example, if your method requires an integer from 1 to 10, test what happens if you feed it with a negative number, zero, 10, 11, a large number, a string, a boolean, NULL, etc. Test it, because someone else might depend on it doing it’s job as designed, and if it doesn’t spend hours trying to figure out why the program doesn’t work (and not look at your failing method). Why do we all work with CI? Because we expect it to be properly tested, and work according to the specs in the manual. And we would be very disappointed if it didn’t.

But then again, I have a degree in IT from the time it meant writing assembler, and learning how parsers and compilers worked. And to build you own compiler given an invented language as an exam, where they would take a program the’ve writting in that invented language and checked if it worked as it should.

Guess that shows my age… 😊