[PLUG] Is XYZ a good intro programming language?

[Phil Tomson]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Preston Crawford wrote:

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Phil Tomson
> Sent: 1/31/2003 3:26:19 AM
> To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?
>
> > 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++.
>
> Of course. Why is that amusing, though? I don't think anyone is saying
>that web-apps are superior. They're just superior in certain situations.
>They're superior when you don't want to have to distribute an installer.
>They're superior when you want something relatively cross-platform. And
>in the case of teaching kids, they could be seen as superior because you
>can show them tangible exciting results without having to learn a
>complicated GUI toolkit. Seems reasonable to me.
>
> Preston

I guess what I found amusing was the suggestion that you couldn't do
anything 'interesting' in C/C++... Where 'interesting' was defined as
being able to create clickable buttons, menus, etc.  The implication being
that you could only do these things with web apps - or maybe it would be
better to say 'apps that run inside of a browser'.  True, the web browser
is just another platform and (for the most part) it's a uniform platform
that runs on other platforms (but I've heard the horror stories about web
apps that run fine under Mozilla, Konqueror and Galeon, but do not work
under IE).

Most of the major scripting languages allow you to develop GUI apps which
work cross-platform so they can offer the same advantages as web-apps.

BTW: Given that the browser is just another platform, you could even use
C/C++ to develop web apps given the right libraries (not that I'm
advocating that :).

BTW2: Mozilla is becoming a platform in it's own right which you can
configure using XUL (XML based, so it's not really a programming
language) - it'll be interesting to see how many apps come out
using Mozilla as the GUI.

Phil