Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>: > That's as may be, but I would still not recommend [C] as a first > language.
I think the field can be approached from many angles successfully. And any approach will fail many students. The nice thing about C is that your feet are firmly on the ground. There's little magic. You can then abstract your concrete knowledge of C to higher-level concepts. In fact, going the other way could be harder. I'm thinking the lofty abstractions like objects will remain sort of mysteries without an experience with a low-level language. That's why first-graders are not given education in abstract algebra or category theory. They are first taught elementary arithmetics. The lofty concepts are abstracted from the low-level concepts and not the other way around. (I had a feeling in high-school that math was easy. In the university, I had the opposite experience: I hadn't understood a thing in high-school. However, the elementary "wrong" knowledge was a stepping stone to the "correct" understanding.) Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
