[Gllug] Logo as a first language

[Andrew Halliwell]

And verily, didst Russell Howe announce to the hordes:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 06:44:29PM +0000, John Southern wrote:
> > Does anyone remember logo? Not icons, but the programming language.
> 
> Yes! Loved playing around with it at primary school on the BBC micros
> (as a taught lesson, no less). Was my first introduction to variables
> and loop constructs, I guess...

BBC Micros at PRIMARY school?
Luxury, we 'ad to use our fingers.

> Difficult!
> 
> Manchester uni used to start CS undergrads off with SML, which is a
> functional (well, mostly...) language. 

Ewwww. Smell isn't exactly an ideal programming language to learn from.
At keele we started with modula-2 and then moved on to C. (Oh, we did a
functional programming with sml MODULE, but procedural and OO programming
were deemed more important)

> Oh, and it will come as no suprise to learn that Manchester now start
> their undergrads off on... Java.

Aye, the year after I started, they moved the first years onto java.
This was back in 1996 when java was still an untested and "fad" language.

> These days I don't really see a reason not to start people off on one of
> the interpreted object oriented languages, although I haven't really
> used any of them :)
> 
> python, ruby, someone already mentioned a smalltalk derivative...
> 
> python's quite neat in that you can bring in the concept of a
> compiler pretty much whenever you like (including not at all :)

Indeed. Python would probably be an ideal starting point, it's simple,
clean, easy to use as either procedural or OO...

 
> Or maybe a functional language.. (S)ML, lisp is probably a bit too
> 'pure', but I've never really used it, haskell, scheme, etc..

Or (bite my tongue and feel ill mentioning it) prolog.
(yeah, hated that)
 
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug