I personally think Pascal in a great educational language.  However, if you
want to learn a something for the money Learn Powersoft's PowerBuilder.
Salaries for that programmer are very high.  Now don't get me wrong, I don't
think you want to see if you like programming by using Powerbuilder.

If you just want to tinker, I really like Delphi.  You learn about Objects
and datatypes.  You also get to play with a GUI builder.

John












Alicia Carla Longstreet wrote:

> BASIC should *NEVER* under any circumstances be taught to first time
> programmers.  It is the worst possible language to use to teach
> programming.  This tirade does not apply to the various modular
> languages, like Visual Basic, that are not really BASIC but use Basic in
> their names.
>
> C is actually a good first langauge.  The set of keywords is small so
> the instructor can concentrate on concepts like  data types, structured
> programming, modularity, encapsulation and data hiding,and algorithms
> rather on a thousand and one commands needed to do all of the above.  A
> beginner needs only <string.h> and <stdio.h> for the first semester, and
> 60% of the functions in these can be safely ignored.  That leaves less
> than 100 keywords that the beginner needs to learn.
>
> Secondly there is absolutely no reason to learn C before C++.  If you do
> not need to learn C go right ahead and just fucus on C++ and ignore C.
> The idea of learning C first is based on the myth that C is a subset of
> C++.
>
> > COBOL, in case your curious, would be closer to basic, but come AFTER
> > it(unless you choose not to learn basic).
>
> COBOL is a dying langauge (although it may take years to die).  Learning
> COBOL is learning the past.  right now, because of Y2K issues, COBOL is
> paying EXTREMELY well, but anybody starting out now to learn COBOL will
> likely miss the big bucks associated with Y2K.
>