[lug] First Programming Language

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 03 Jan 2018 21:57:48 -0700
Michael J. Hammel wrote:

> Python has apparently raised a generation of really bad programmers who
> write unmaintainable code. It's structure is less like many other more
> useful languages than Javascript and nodejs can show her what real
> object orientation looks like.

Oh, come now. Laying poor programming knowledge at the feet of Python,
vs. any other language? I'll bet that there is vastly more bad software,
and bad programmers out there, from the hordes of people who jumped onto
web development and "learned" JavaScript on the fly without a solid
grounding in good practice, than there is such from Python. It's just as
possible to be a bad programmer in OCaml or Haskell as it is to be a bad
programmer in Fortran. We might as well point fingers at PHP as well.

I wish I could find it now, but ESR wrote a piece highly complimentary of
Python. Oh, the things I wish I had bookmarked, such as another thing I
recall reading pointing out all the bad things about JavaScript as a
language.

I'm still in favor of building a solid foundation. That makes me think of
C. Doing a web search for "beginner programming language", Python seems
to be the popular choice. Or maybe Swift?