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From: henke@hv.se (Henrik Wetterstrom)
Subject: Re: What's the best language to start with? [was: Re: Should I learn
 C or Pascal?]
Date: 1996/08/05
Message-ID: <4u5maf$eb2@eken.hv.se>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 172440047
references: <01bb8027$de0e9c80$96ee6fcf@timhome2>
organization: V�xj� university
reply-to: henke@hv.se
newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-08-05T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <01bb8027$de0e9c80$96ee6fcf@timhome2>, "Tim Behrendsen" <tim@airshields.com> writes:
>
>Let's try a thought experiment.  We take two students; Jane is taught
>assembly from day 1 for two years.  John is taught C for two years.
>Both are exposed to identical curriculums of algorithmic analysis,
>data structures, etc.
>
>Two years later, they switch roles.  Who will learn the other's skills
>the easiest?  I say C will be the most obvious thing in the world to
>Jane, and within a few weeks she will out-code John by a longshot.
>She will instantly see what subroutines, automatic variables,
>static variables, pointers, argument passing, call-by-value v.s.
>call-by-reference, arrays, you name it, are all about.  She will
>already know the concepts; it's just a matter of learning the syntax.
>And if she's ever confused, she can always look at the assembly
>output.
>
>John will be hopelessly confused at first, because he will have
>absolutely no grounding in what the C syntax really means.  He will
>have to start completely from scratch.  His C syntactical experience
>will be almost useless in learning assembly, because the mechanisms
>behind the "magic" have been hidden to him.

I consider myself as an "instance" of Jane and agree completely.
I learned assembler years before any other highlevel language.
Ok, when programming in assembler is it hard to ignore C, since
many system resources are documented as C structures, so you
usually get small parts of C for free when learning assembler.

However, the problem comes when you go further. Assume both
John and Jane learned both assembler and C. It is time to
learn C++ (or any other object oriented langauge).
The higher level of abstraction in OO programming is a bit harder
for a lowlevel programmer to get used to. Virtual functions,
inheritance, garbage collection etc. will take time to learn, but
I believe John would learn it faster than Jane. At least that's
my own experience.

I guess it could be better to learn C++ before C. C programmers
who go C++ tend to still program C, but with a few C++ features.
Once you are unsecure about the C++, then you go C and eventually
end up with one class and 30 functions.

Still a good programmer should learn assembler, but when to
do it? I don't have a good answer...

There's no perfect solution to teaching computer programming.

/Henrik