On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Peter Hansen wrote: > Andrea Griffini wrote: >> On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:52:57 -0400, Peter Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> wrote: >> >>> I think new CS students have more than enough to learn with their >>> *first* language without having to discover the trials and >>> tribulations of memory management (or those other things that Python >>> hides so well). >> >> I'm not sure that postponing learning what memory is, what a pointer is >> and others "bare metal" problems is a good idea. ... I think that for a >> programmer skipping the understanding of the implementation is just >> impossible: if you don't understand how a computer works you're going >> to write pretty silly programs. > > I won't say that I'm certain about any of this, but I have a very strong > suspicion that the *best* first step in learning programming is a program > very much like the following, which I'm pretty sure was mine: > > 10 FOR A=1 TO 10: PRINT"Peter is great!": END
10 PRINT "TOM IS ACE" 20 GOTO 10 The first line varies, but i suspect the line "20 GOTO 10" figures prominently in the early history of a great many programmers. > More importantly by far, *I made the computer do something*. Bingo. When you realise you can make the computer do things, it fundamentally changes your relationship with it, and that's the beginning of thinking like a programmer. tom -- Think logical, act incremental -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
