I 'm thinking about starting from the ground up with a more general purpose language such as C; ...

[G+_Tim Young]

I'm thinking about starting from the ground up with a more general purpose language such as C; what do you guys think of that these days? Sure, a high-level language such as Python is popular; but lots of seemingly wise info says that having C under one's belt makes learning other languages much easier. I thought about trying to learn Objective-C straight off the bat, to get ready for some iOS/Mac apps, but advice on doing that seems to go back to learning basic C/C++ first.

 

Before making a career in computer networking, I used to be very proficient in programming BASIC & Pascal. Coding 101 has me interested to get down and dirty with the keyboard and choose a more relevant language to learn. C# is very cool for its popularity and Object Orientation, but I'm not going to be programming for Windows apps.

 

#C   #Programming   #Python     #ObjectiveC     #C #    (tags)

[G+_Carlos Urrutia]

I believe they plan on doing C++ later. Not sure when, but I'm patient :)

[G+_Pete Murphy]

I think they said they were going to change languages each 6 weeks or so. The idea seems to be to teach us the 'principles' of coding in general and we can later take it further wherever we wanted.

 

I had the same idea at the start - "What language should I learn to get started". Now I think along the lines of just learning general features of how languages work and later on look at focusing on something once I have learnt the basics....

[G+_Lee Crocker]

Consider Go. I've been a C programmer for 30 years, and I've seen all the attempts to "improve" it -- C++, Objective C, C#, D, as failures (some more than others :-), but Go might just be the one that got it right. It's got the speed and versatility of C, but with garbage collection, interfaces, concurrency, and is very simple and clean.

[G+_Tim Young]

Interesting, Lee; however Go seems to have quite tepid support for use. just like Dart--Google's other new language. C and Java appear to be the dominating languages, along with C# for Windows use; however I won't touch Java (being a full Apple user, and because of Java's weight and frequent security issues). C# looks cool but I question the longer-haul viability, especially with the appearance of Microsoft condoning Android for its mobile devices.

[G+_Michael Ross Murphy]

May I suggest the Groovy language? It is based on Java, but has all the power of C. Groovy provides an easy scripting mode as well as an interactive shell like Python's Idle interface. Groovy is fully OO but achieves this with simplicity and without "high ceremony". Runs easily cross-platform in Mac / Linux / Windows...

 

Absolutely free... Http://groovy.codehaus.org

[G+_Lee Crocker]

I think "What language should I learn?" is a dangerous question. You should learn programming concepts, not language details, but for a beginner it might be hard to tell which is which. That's also a problem with this podcast: Padre is a details guy, but when it comes to big-picture concepts, it's clear he's out of his depth. Pick whatever language makes it easy for you to do the kind of things you want to do -- but if you're still learning, keep an eye out for concepts from other language and other kinds of tasks.