Re: Beginner's Language?

[Friedrich Dominicus <frido@q-software-solutions.com>]

a.krennmair@aon.at (Andreas Krennmair) writes:

> >  yes, yes 
> for my comment, see above. Lisp has hardly anything in common with natural
> languages. Or could you express "My girlfriend's name is Suzy and her age
> is 17" as readable as this in Lisp:
> $girlfriend{'name'} = "Suzy";
> $girlfriend{'age'} = 17;

Now there are different ways to do it. Some were pointed out in
another mail, but you could expose the Data-Structure behind the Hash
Table in Lisp. You may say who cares, but learning programming is to
some extend about learning data structures too.

so there are different ways to make a girl-friend
a) as structure
(defstruct girl-friend
      name
      age)


(defvar *my-girl-friend* (make-girl-friend :name "Ann" :age 30))

b) as property list
left out because other have done it

c) as object (subject;-)
(defclass girl-friend ()
                   ((name :initarg :name :accessor name)
                    (age :initarg :age :accessor age)))


(setf my-girl (make-instance 'girl-friend 
                                 :name "Foo"
                                 :age 20))



Now you have just one option in Pascal you have to write

type Girl_friend = record
   name : STRING [30];
   age : INTEGER
end

my-girl : (POINTER ?) Girl_friend;

my_girl.name := "Ann";
my_girl.age  := 30;

What is if you have a longer name? What is if you declare my_girl to
be a Pointer to Girl_friend?
Why should that be easier to understand?

I had to learn programming with Modula-2 and it was the hell for
me. I doubt that it could have been worse while learning Lisp.


> No. Only after understanding the fundamental concepts of Lisp.

So what? I have to understand the fundamental concepts of any
programming langauge why is Pascal different here.
> 
> > >Is it intuitively obvious to
> > > even the most casual observer how to make a similar program?
> >  yes
> No. See answer before. :)
Again why is a record struct in Pascal easier to understand than in
Lisp. What about the Pointers? What about memory handling etc?

> >  he/she started from. If he starts with Lisp; C, Java looks messy. If
> It _does_ matter. Beginners can easily get frustrated because of the
> sometimes confusing syntax. BTW, I wouldn't recommend starting with Java
> or C/C++, either. I'd recommend and teach (if I were a teacher :) some
> Wirth language, because they're designed especially for teaching basics
> of programming.

For a special kind of learning inflexible languages. IMHO the whole
books and langauges have one big advantage. The are there for Top-down
devlopment. No space for errors, no space for piecemeal grow. If you
forget a ; you get a friendly message that you're an idiot (not
really) you have to go back to you editor fix that bug and compile it
again.

You can not simply test out a function by itself in no time. You have
to stop recompile and start again. All this is so tedious and
frustrating that I can't see any reason why that should be a good
thing.

Regards
Friedrich