Re: [MLUG] good intro to programming for a teenager?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 8/8/05, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Jeremy Hinegardner wrote:
> 
> > Chris Pine has a beginning tutorial.  Its title is in fact:
> >
> >     Learn to Program
> >     A Tutorial for the Future Programmer
> >
> >     http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
> 
> Cool.  It's written for Ruby.
> 
> What do you guys think?  Is Ruby as good a choice as Python?

I can't believe I forgot Ruby...  I could argue that in some ways,
Ruby would be a better choice than Python, but both are good choices. 
I'm not a fan of meaningful whitespace or leading underscores, or
languages that (at last I knew) had sort-of-but-not-quite lexical
scoping rules.  But there are millions more Python programmers than
Ruby programmers, and that does have an effect on what you'd choose.

The nice thing about scripting languages generally is that they have
some powerful constructs that let you get stuff going with
surprisingly little effort.  Obviously, Perl is this way, too, but
Perl is pretty obviously the second, third, or nth language you learn
and not the first one.

You also asked about scheme, and whether anybody really used it much. 
What I can say is that by far the biggest and best reason to use
scheme is that SICP uses it; the two go really well together.  Scheme
is also a very pure, small Lisp, and there are implementations
available for almost everything.  But I wouldn't go the scheme route
unless you do SICP, and for somebody who *hasn't* had algebra yet,
that might not be a great choice.

> The tutorial using Ruby looks pretty nice -- I can definitely imagine him getting into
> that one.  Is there a similar intro tutorial for Python?

Man, you would expect so. :-)

jking

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