HELP! Must choose language!

[Delaney, Timothy]

> From: Grant Edwards [mailto:grante at visi.com]
> 
> That would be an interesting approach.  I think everybody should learn
> PDP-11 assembly and look at the instruction set at the 
> machine level.  It
> was a beautiful design.

The Nova 2 (also a descendent of the PDP-8) was a much nicer design than the
PDP-11. Very consistent.

> > I'm even hoping to teach a class that way...
> 
> I wonder if you could find a PDP-11 simulator and assembler 
> somewhere...

I wrote as a group final-year uni project some time ago a Nova 2 simulator
called "Satori" (named after "Nova Satori" in Robotech: The Robotech Masters
;) I even wrote an assembler for it.

Front panel with usable switches, teletype, tape reader and puncher, the
works. Fun stuff. Written in C on the Mac.

My recommendation for a high-schooler wishing to learn programming is to
definitely go with Python. Even if you never use the language later in life
(which I doubt) it is an excellent language for learning many of the
important concepts and disciplines required in programming. It is also a
language which you can grow with as you learn other languages and see how to
apply different concepts. In particular, I often prototype things in Python
as a way to gather my thoughts before sitting down and properly designing
something, independent of which language the final product will be written
in.

Tim Delaney