[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

Steven Adams stevea at nwtechops.com
Thu Jan 30 05:47:01 UTC 2003


On Thursday 30 January 2003 05:20, Felix Lee wrote:
> Steven Adams <stevea at nwtechops.com>:
> > I agree, Perl is a really good choice to promote the learning of good
> > programming habits.
>
> ummmm... no.  Perl encourages sloppy programming.  it's far
> too irregular and has too much magic behavior.
>
> simple example.  this:
>
>     while (my $line = <IN>) { ... }
>
> does not do the same thing as this:
>
>     sub in { return <IN>; }
>     while (my $line = in ()) { ... }
>
> and there's no warning for that.

ummmm...  I guess it would help to read the entire thread (or at least the 
subject line). 

So are you saying is that PHP and other Apache/DHTML environments (perhaps 
Apache::Asp or Cold Fusion) will teach better habits? 

The context of this thread is where to begin teaching introductory programming 
and the question was quite specific. While Perl is not perfect, I do think 
that it promotes teaching better habits than the other languages discussed 
while providing a great segway into some of the more rigid concepts of the C 
family - but hey, it's only one opinion shared by many. 






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