[Tutor] Languages, was Which programming language is better to start with

[Remco Gerlich]

On  0, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry <shalehperry@attbi.com> wrote:
> I started in C, worked up to C++ and then learned perl, lisp and python. 
> Having started in C where I had nothing I learned to be good at managing
> resources and careful planning.  It was hard though.  No doubt.

Just some anecdotal stuff;

I started when I was 11, learning BASIC on a Commodore 64. I did learn a
*tiny* bit of machine language on it, but never made anything in it more
than 40 commands long or so.

Then my parents got a genuine IBM PC XT. I played with GW Basic for a while.
Then someone gave me Turbo Pascal 4.0. This was great. As a little computer
nerd I had gotten books from the library on Cobol, Fortran, and Pascal (all
they had) and the Pascal was enough to get me started, the TP help pages
helped a lot after that.

Later on I got to university, computer science, the big language was Pascal,
but without the TP extensions... I was good at it but it's not very
practical. Over the course of the study we also had C, Prolog, Haskell,
Atari ST machine language, Java, and a few more that I can't remember right
now (one for parallel programming, and some Modula thing at least).

Then I had to do some lab session with VTK, the Visualization Toolkit. It
had Tcl bindings, which were at the time reputedly slightly more mature than
the Python bindings, whatever Python was. So I learned Tcl.

Tcl was *great*. We could code pretty quickly, although lack of some things
(namespaces) was irritating. We needed a file format for movie scripts, and
a stroke of genius told me it was good to give the files the same syntax as
Tcl itself, define a few commands, and without much effort we had an
extremely powerful format. The teacher was much impressed.

Around this time I joined the ZAngband DevTeam, and Python integration was a
big buzzword. I wasn't working on it; but it was obvious I'd have to learn
it some day.

Then I met Perl. Perl beat Tcl in so many ways it wasn't pretty. Perl was so
great (I haven't mentioned so far - in the seven or so years since I joined
the uni [I am that slow] I had only used Unix and Linux - so Perl ruled for
me). For a few months I wrote everything I needed in Perl.

Then ZAngband Python support was slowly getting somewhere, I thought I
should learn it, and I went to the Tutorial. I think that's two years ago
now.

Apart from a little bit of C for ZAngband, I haven't written *anything* in a
language other than Python since then. It was love at first sight. I can
forget all of the above; Python obsoletes it, period. By now I'm finally
about to finish my study, there are thousands of lines of code for my
thesis, and they're all Python. And it's fun! I haven't had so much fun
coding since finding out about Turbo Pascal at the age of 13...

One caveat - recently some Perl program needed a package I didn't have. I
typed, as a first try, perl -CPAN install <package>, or something like that.
Screen upon screen of text scrolled by - I needed this package so it was
installed, that package was outdated so it was updated, hey I don't have
those yet but now I do, etc - all completely automatic. That was awesome,
and distutils aren't quite there yet. Perl leads there.

But for all else, Python is the best.

I have no idea why I'm posting this except it's late at night and I'd like
to know a bit about the language backgrounds of other people...

-- 
Remco Gerlich