HELP! Must choose language!

[Nick Vargish]

"Karl A. Krueger" <kkrueger at example.edu> writes:

> I'd played with BASIC and Forth before high school age, but had Scheme
> and Pascal in classes around that age. 

I wish the CS teacher in my high school had introduced us to
Scheme. That would have been great. As it was, I got so bored with
Pascal that I taught myself FORTH. For a month I submitted all my
class exercises in FORTH, until he begged me to stop... "I can see
that your programs work, but I can't figure out _how_ they work."

So I talked him into letting me do the rest of the year in C, which
was fun and prevented the rest of the class from "looking over my
shoulder" when it came to in-class assignments.

> When I had Pascal the following year, the only real trouble was the
> teacher's very sneaky trick questions, intended to teach careful
> programming in a language that doesn't lend itself to same ...

I got a 99% on the final, because apparently Wile E. Coyote did not
invent the Pascal programming language. :^)

> Boolean logic isn't in the usual American high-school math sequence,
> which is a shame, but it's a better introduction to proofs than geometry
> is, IMHO, since it is simpler:

Good point. I didn't get boolean logic until I started taking
Philosophy classes in college. That does say something sad about the
curriculum of my high school, I guess (Singapore American School,
early-mid 80s).

> "A tuple is like an ordered pair in geometry." ...

Thanks, I knew that. :^)

I'm taking a lot of heat here for my "pragmatic" advice. In my
defense, for some reason I thought the original poster was in 12th
grade, not 9th. So let me change my original answer:

"Learn Python, but it will spoil you for anything else you might be
forced to use in the future..."

Nick

-- 
#include<stdio.h> /* SigMask 0.3 (sig.c) 19990429 PUBLIC DOMAIN "Compile Me" */
int main(c,v)char *v;{return !c?putchar(*v-1)&&main(0,v+ /* Tweaks welcomed. */
1):main(0,"Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAqbusjpu/ofu?\v\1");}  /* build: cc -o sig sig.c */