[PLUG] Re: new guy with questions

[Eric Biggs]

>Let's see if I can do this without starting a language war...
>
>C++ is a predominant language, but it may not be the best language to
>start with.  If you want to learn to program because you'd like to be
>able to create useful little programs for your own use, I would
>suggest starting with a scripting language (perl, python and ruby are
>common choices.  It is also good to know a little bash, since you can
>run into a fair bit of that when using/configuring linux if you dig
>into the details.).  These are "High-level" languages -- they provide
>more of an abstraction between you and the computer.

My understanding of computer languages is not that extensive.  I kind of 
thought that in computer languages there were "high", "assemby" and 
"mechanical," where a compiler was necessary to *interpret* from a 
high-level language to a mechanical one enabling the computer to understand 
the human.  Therefore, I was under the impression that most of the 
programming that was done would have to utilize an High-level language.  I 
also thought that assembly languages were one step removed from a mechanical 
one, again not being utilized as often.

>If you are interested in the gory details about how computers "work"
>-- how values are stored, how memory is managed, etc.. then C is a
>good language.  In C you will be forced to manually manage your own
>memory (at least at first -- there are tools that will do some of this
>for you, but none work all the time.)  C doesn't abstract very much
>from the internal hardware.

Yes, this kind of does sound interesting.  I know that I am in the spoon 
feeding stage on this, though and was looking to just get my feet wet.  Lisp 
sounds attractive, and I have heard about Python and Ruby.

>If you are interested in the theory of computer languages, then a
>functional language may be more to your liking...

Again, my knowledge (which can easily be incorrect) only recognizes the 
three categories....What is implied with a "functional language?"

Eric Biggs

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