[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

[Steven Adams]

Here too - 1985

On Wednesday 29 January 2003 16:35, Robby Russell wrote:
> pascal.
>
>
> <?echo Roderick A. Anderson managed to take the time to type out the
>
> following:
> > On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Eric House wrote:
> >> And so, suspecting that writing little programs that can be run on the
> >> web would be more fun than doing exercises from K&R, I've been
> >> thinking of using PHP to introduce these two to programming.
> >>
> >> Does this strike anyone as an unusually good, or stupid, idea?
> >
> > There is the issue of not only trying to learn to program they are also
> > probably having to learn HTML.  The reason I dislike VisualBASIC (which
> > the local college uses) so much in a teaching atmosphere.  How do you
> > teach the basic concepts of programming when you're fighting the GUI.
> > (If you ever look at VB you'll notice it doesn't even follow the Windows
> > standard layout/behavior.)
> >
> > <soapbox>
> > Go for the command line stuff first.  Maybe not as cute as a graphical
> > presentation but the student can concentrate on programming first then
> > play with the presentation later.  And my personal favorite is Perl.
> > This is based on learning using BASIC, followed by FORTRAN, back to
> > BASIC, C, (god forbid but I started understand some old COBOL code I was
> > debugging), C++, Perl, Tcl, Perl, shell (bash), Perl.  And did I mention
> > Perl?  :-)  Then one day I was encouraged (required) to teach
> > VisualBASIC.   I spent more time in the class room trying to get the
> > code window  reopened on students computers then getting them to enter
> > code.
> > </soapbox>
> >
> >
> > Rod
> > --
> >   "Open Source Software - Sometimes you get more than you paid for..."
> >
> >
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>
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