>>>>"RB" == Richard Bos <rl*@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nlwrites:
RB"Alex Pavluck" <ap******@gmail.comwrote:
>I program in SAS for my job. I am interested in programming
and I picked up Python for a hobby. However, my friend just
finished a CS course on C and he thinks that I should switch to
C because it is "the best" learning language. Any thoughts?
RBHe's a nutcase. C is one of the best programming languages,
RBbut a bad learning language. It's too flexible; it will not
RBteach you good style and restraint.
C was my third programming language. It's the one that really taught
me how to program, and how to program defensively.
RBWhile you are still learning you need to be taught
RBgood programming practices, and a B&D language like Pascal
RBwill help you with that. C won't.
But Pascal won't really help you with that either; all you'll learn is
that you must do this or that to make the compiler happy, and then
when you get to C, you won't have the compiler complaining. Pascal
will impose good programming practices on you, but you won't
understand why they're good programming practices.
On the other hand, I wrote excessively neat (some might say
anal-retentive) C when I first learned, because if it wasn't clean, I
didn't stand a chance of debugging it.
Charlton
--
Charlton Wilbur
cw*****@chromatico.net