[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

[Phil Tomson]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 me at prestoncrawford.com wrote:

>
>
> 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

I find this whole 'web centric' approach a bit amusing... I mean most GUI
apps are still developed in C/C++.  Yeah a lot of web apps are developed
in Java now and apparently PHP is the web programming language de jour,
but most desktop applications are written in C/C++.

However, I wouldn't recommend teaching C/C++ to kids, but not because you
can't do anything 'terribly interesting' in those languages.... I suspect
that the GUI you typed that in was written in C or C++ ;-)

Phil