[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

me at prestoncrawford.com me at prestoncrawford.com
Fri Jan 31 07:11:02 UTC 2003


On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, 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.

I agree, incidentally. I mean, I think a good backing in a C or C++ is
good for providing solid fundamentals, but it's infinitely more useful and
interesting to be able to actually get things done. And with PHP/HTML,
etc. you can actually start manipulating input, creating buttons, etc.
whereas the most you can do in C and C++ is read user input from the
stdin, manipulate it, and spit something out. This is useful in its own
right, but not terribly interesting.

Preston





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