Complementary language?

[Alan Gauld]

On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 18:40:31 -0500, HackingYodel
<taoiststarter at -nospam-yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello all!  I'm learning to program at home.  I can't imagine a better 
> language than Python for this.  The ideal situation, for me, would be to 
> study two languages at the same time.  Probably sounds crazy, but it 
> works out better for me.  

Me too, thats why my web tutorial features Python, VBSCript and
Javascript. (The previous version had BASIC and Tcl with Python)

> fascinating.  C, D, Objective-C, Ocaml, C++, Lisp, how is a non-tech to 
> choose?  Does any single language do a better job in Python's weaker 
> areas? 

C is better at low level stuff, Prolog is better at declaratie
programming and Haskell is better at functional programming.
Lisp/Scheme are good for giving a good theoretical understanding
(try the SICP and HTDP web sites). And Tcl has a really different
approach which is plain fun to grapple with :-)

I chose VBScript and JavaScript because they have similar
structure to Python (traditional imperative programming 
with OOP) but very different syntax. Plus they were free and
easily available (albeit with VBScript limited to Windows 
users, who are 80+% of my visitors). Javascript is especially
useful since its an easy lead in to learning C/C++, Java, 
even Perl to some extent and a lot of sample code sites 
use those languages.

Alan G.
Author of the Learn to Program website
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld