> I think there is a mistaken assumption in the question that was first > asked, and that many seem to have taken at face value: that Java is an > appropriate language for learning programming. I don't think this is true.
hi all! I will not contribute anything to the "tim-thread", 'nuff said ;o) as I am giving courses for developers ranging from fundamental programming logic, C, OO basics, OOA/OOD, C++ and JAVA I want to express my opinion on the above statement (with which I choose to disagree ;o) I myself started with BASIC on a C64 at the age of 12 I think (some while ago ;) and accumulated I think 18 languages so far (most of them not used actively any more of course). I do not think that BASIC (be it QBASIC, VB or whatever) is a very good place to start. all developers I meet/met that come either from procedural languages (host development with COBOL, PL/1, Fortran or the like) or from VB (not *really* OO ;o) do have extreme difficulties to get rid of a bunch of nasty habits that are a direct consequence of the languages they worked in (for quite a while mostly) PASCAL is a good start for getting a grasp on the concepts of structured programming, but the syntax is quite far off if you want to go into the C++/JAVA direction. (BTW, talking of learning languages... does anyone remember MODULA 2? quite a good thing, the successor of PASCAL, also conceived by nicolaus wirth, inventor of PASCAL. later he did OBERON which never got a catch in the industry despite of having some great concepts) some postings suggested C as a beginners language. I do not think that is quite a good idea either, too many catches for the rookie, think of explicit memory handling, side effects, missing boolean type, pointers etc etc... if you want to show the basic procedural concepts, why not use the procedural parts of JAVA? it is perfectly possible to write simple demo programs without knowing anything about the OO syntax/concepts (ok, you have to declare an enclosing class and a main-method; count that and "System.out.println()" as a "cooking recipe" and explain that later on ;o) so, to make a long story short: PASCAL or MODULA 2 if you do not care about C/C++/JAVA-like syntax. else JAVA ;o) cheers PS: > Java introduces two important and difficult topics at the same time: > programming and object-oriented design. Because they're so intertwined in > Java, it's hard to get a handle of one if you don't already have a handle > on the other. well, yes, so do not introduce them at the same time ;o) OO-knowledge is not necessary to use JAVA for examples of simple iterators, selectors and all procedural stuff. -- Werden Sie mit uns zum "OnlineStar 2002"! Jetzt GMX w�hlen - und tolle Preise absahnen! http://www.onlinestar.de ____________________________________________________ To change your JDJList options, please visit: http://www.sys-con.com/java/list.cfm Save Bandwidth! Clean up your posts before replying ____________________________________________________
