[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

[Phil Tomson]

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Eric House wrote:

> I'm a "professional" C/C++/Java programmer who dabbles in perl cgi
> scripts and whose friends have been urging him to learn PHP.  In
> addition, I have a close friend and a 10-year-old daughter, both very
> bright but neither with any programming experience, who want to "learn
> to program."
>
> 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?
>
> Any suggestions on PHP books that might be suitable for all of us?  Or
> should I just get whatever O'Reilley has on the subject and create
> exercises for the "class"?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --Eric House

Is PHP really a programming language, I mean I hear it's good for web
apps, but what about stand alon projects? ;-)

OK, I'll throw my favorite programming language in the mix (why not?
everybody else is doing it :) - I've programmed in C/C++, Java, Perl, some
Tcl (yuk!) I even tried out Python one afternoon but didn't like that
indentation was part of syntax...  but my favorite for the last couple of
years is Ruby.

The best way to quickly describe Ruby is that it's SmallTalk meets Perl.
The syntax is clean and expressive and the object oriented features in
addition to things like iterators are very consistently used in all of the
standard libraries.

Give it a look:
http://www.ruby-lang.org
You can find the book "Programming Ruby" online, free at:
http://rubycentral.com

Phil