From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Mar 11 10:25:20 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from flood.ping.uio.no (flood.ping.uio.no [129.240.78.31]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F38437B71A for ; Sun, 11 Mar 2001 10:25:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from des@ofug.org) Received: (from des@localhost) by flood.ping.uio.no (8.9.3/8.9.3) id TAA36458; Sun, 11 Mar 2001 19:25:13 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from des@ofug.org) X-URL: http://www.ofug.org/~des/ X-Disclaimer: The views expressed in this message do not necessarily coincide with those of any organisation or company with which I am or have been affiliated. To: Joe Warner Cc: "Tyler K McGeorge" , "Damien Tougas" , Subject: Re: Looking for Yoda References: <20010310230724.A292@sprig.tougas.net> <01031110255100.00538@blackmirror.xmission.com> <01031110565703.00538@blackmirror.xmission.com> From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Date: 11 Mar 2001 19:25:12 +0100 In-Reply-To: Joe Warner's message of "Sun, 11 Mar 2001 10:45:23 -0700" Message-ID: Lines: 21 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) Emacs/20.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Joe Warner writes: > > I switched to C after several years of BASIC and Pascal, > > on a recommendation from my eldest brother. > Do you recommend starting with another language as a stepping stone before > diving into C or is it all right to just begin with C? Start with C, and no matter what anyone says, stay away from C++ until you really understand C. Other people will say "start with Java" or "start with Perl" or "start with Python" or "start with Ruby"... but Perl will only teach you bad habits, Java will probably only frustrate you with its extremely slow edit-compile-run cycle, and while Python and Ruby are fine languages, they won't prepare you for C (and you *will* end up hacking C sooner or later...) Any other language will be either too old to be of interest, or lack the large base of existing documentation and code that C, C++, Perl, Java, and lately Python and Ruby enjoy. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message