[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

[Steven Adams]

On Thursday 30 January 2003 09:33 pm, Felix Lee wrote:
> Steven Adams <stevea at nwtechops.com>:
> > You have to understand that if the first language is either difficult or
> > not productive then the student is much more likely to lose interest and
> > quit (especially young students).
>
> yes, which is why PHP is fine.  generating web pages is
> interesting.  Perl doesn't do anything terribly interesting
> until you have a lot of Perl, unless you like doing sysadmin.

Nobody doubts that PHP is fine, it's just focused on web stuff. As I said 
originally, I am not a PHP guru but I am by no means being critical of that 
product - nor of those that put it to work. It's fairly obvious that it has 
many followers and that it is quite capable (I thought I made my view on that 
subject abundantly clear in previous posts).

Take a look at mod_perl and get an overview. In fact, the plug site runs on 
mason (which is a perl module). BTW - both products are Apach projects.
>
> > I'm really puzzled why you would think that someone with
> > no knowledge of the language could write code precisely and
> > clearly (I liken that to me speaking fluent Japanese
> > without studying that language).
>
> I didn't say you could write clearly and precisely without
> knowledge of a language.  knowledge of the language is a
> prerequisite, and that's why Perl is less than ideal.  it's
> _hard_ to know Perl.  there are too many complex
> interactions between its various parts.

I don't find perl any more difficult than bash, bourne or korn. It is, 
however, tons easier than a lot of languages.

> most computer languages are not very complicated and not
> very different, it's not that hard to learn a new one.  it's
> not like learning Japanese.  if I had to use an unfamiliar
> language like Ruby, I'd sit down with the reference manual,
> spend a day reading it, another day reading other people's
> programs, and that's probably enough for me to start writing
> reasonable Ruby programs.

To a 10 year old it might be, and that was the original question.

> Perl is a lot harder than that.  it takes a long time to
> read its manual and learn how all its parts interact.  Perl
> tricks you into thinking there's an easy learning curve,
> that you can just learn a little of it at a time, but that's
> not really true.

It took me roughly 3 weeks to come up to speed. Granted, I am no beginner but 
the concepts that Perl preaches is, like most scripting languages, not rocket 
science.

Now before this gets too much further out of hand, let's get back to reality. 
I only made a suggestion that I know, again from experience, works well. I 
don't want it to seem like I'm a hard core - nothing else will do - 
perlmonger. I don't wear those boots and I don't maintain any sort of major 
loyalty to perl or any other technologies, I reserve that loyalty for my 
family and friends. In my opinion it is not wrong to teach beginners perl, 
PHP, Ruby or any other host of languages - they're all fun and interesting to 
those of us that like that sort of thing.