[PLUG] Is XYZ a good intro programming language?

[Steven Adams]

On Friday 31 January 2003 11:33 am, Phil Tomson wrote:

> 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

Wow, the original thread has really gone astray. The intent was to look at 
what a good introductory language to teach a 10 year old would be. That's why 
you haven't heard anything about the C family, teaching concepts like 
malloc(), polymorphism, inheiritance, operator overloading, C style pointers 
and the likes is probably not appropriate for most 10 yo's (they work for me 
though, I love that stuff). I don't think anyone that's been contributing 
intended to imply that nothing interesting could be done in C, after all - 
without C we would not have *nix workstations and servers: How interesting 
would that be? The discussion was on what would get the interest of a beginer 
and provide a good introductory path to programming, and the web/script stuff 
certainly fits that bill (not to say that C would be out in all cases but a 
10 year old that could hook into C and stick with it's probably rare).