jt #46 — this is a real issue. On the one hand, the BASIC era produced people who loved to program in great numbers. On the other hand, textbooks that return to those old days and those old ways, with modern languages, seem like anachronisms. What would John Kemeny say today? Basic was a good teaching language. It is exactly the opposite result that JAVA has had on young programmers, that makes me take such a hard line on Java.

I really think people should have a closer look at gawk as “clean perl”. You then have to learn something else — C, C++, C#, js, php, python, ruby, perl, or java — but you can keep your gawk for lots of tasks.

My opinions about languages usually come not from looking at the syntax, the libraries, nor even from doing a lot of programming in each, but from watching programmers do various tasks in them. When you see mass frustration, widespread failure, rigid designs, and projects with generous development times delivered late, you know something is wrong. When you hear people talking about how much they love their language (the Paul Graham test), it’s good to have a listen.

1. Up until recently Ruby had little existance outside of Rails.
2. Free Books – Dive into Python, How to think like a computer scientist etc.
3. Libraries, books and information – wxpython, gtk, pyqt, pygame – there are not only these libraries but also books on how to use them
4. Python is installed by default on most *nixes
5. Want to move from interpreted to compiled languages? Boo is a .Net language inspired by Python and runs at almost C# speeds. You also have jython or ironpython for Java/.Net
6. Django, turbogears, web.py etc. give many choices over Ruby on Rails alone.

From the little I learned of Ruby, I think the difference of learning Python or Ruby is minimal but I once you move beyond the basics, Python becomes a much more relevant language.

Baloney. Most people that investigate teaching kids programming eventually come across Squeak. Squeak as a language and idea rocks–I love it. Squeak the implementation actively turns children away from programming. Have you tried teaching Squeak to a child? Contrast this with PyGame, Pyglet or Gamemaker and it’s no wonder people eventually abandon Squeak.

http://www.freebasic.net

Now, looking at the alternative (Squeak), which is fully OOP all the way down to the very menus and icons, buttons, which has a much richer environment and is totally ready for multimedia, along with the derived (written in Squeak) Scratch language, I think it’s very bad that we’re returning to Basic.

Kids deserve something better in 2008, and we can deliver it, just as long as we keep our prejudice at bay against Smalltalk (because it really is about prejudice and lack of information).

It’s in the FAQ.

“Not even 2 questions in and we’re getting into double underscores and name mangling!”

Name mangling doesn’t enter into it. Double underscores aren’t any harder to explain than exclamation points or at signs. “How do I make my object do X” comes after a lot more than 2 questions.

“You can write Ruby in the exact same indentation style as Python, if you like.”

I think significant indentation is more trouble than it’s worth, but pointing out that you can indent however you like in a language without it is missing the point.

“Pythons syntax has proven so problematic that numerous attempts to introduce block literals have failed.”

There’s never been any consensus that block literals (in Python-speak, multi-line lambdas) are desirable. I wouldn’t be surprised if some random person has tried it; I once wrote a codec for braces, just to prove it could be done. There was a PEP for “anonymous blocks”, but they were intended for a specific purpose and rejected for reasons other than syntax.

“Ruby is slow? Which implementation are you referring to exactly.”

The stable reference implementation, obviously.