[Gllug] Logo as a first language

[Ian Norton]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 01:17:28PM +0000, David Damerell wrote:
> On Thursday, 3 Mar 2005, John Southern wrote:
> >Also what would be the idea programming language you would learn if
> >you had to start all over again today?
> 
> Perl. It's easy to start on, and I've had more joy out of Perl than
> out of any other language.
> 
> However, I think those of us who grew up in the 8-bit days had a
> fairly fundamental advantage; simple screen output, both screen-mode
> text and graphical.

I nearly had a totally different computer upbringing, mainly because mum
decided that amstrad home pc thing she got (newish) was really crap and took it
back the same week, She came back soon after with an Atari ST (this was 1986).
Fantastic little machine, it still works to! (although now has 4mb RAM and a
300Mb scsi drive)
 
> Yes, there are reasons why it's more complex now - but nevertheless, I
> think there's no equivalent to the, say, BBC BASIC situation where the
> equivalent of ncurses - stick these letters in these colours here on
> the screen - is one of the very first things you learn.

Last year sometime they got us doing that in assembler/C using vt100 and ICL
codes on an ARM 7t dev board, They gave us a bunch of old ICL terminals from 
when the uni had it's mainframe system and we had to make a nice IRC like chat 
system work between several arm boards using the ICLs and PCs with minicom as the
terminals to chat from.

I wish I'd had more access to the beebs at my junior school, I can vaguely
recall making one those 'guess the number' programs on a beeb instead of doing
what I was supposed to.

-- 
Ian Norton-Badrul

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