Re: Re: Re: Beginning Programming with Perl

[fruiture]

I have learned first programming at school with Pascal (and that seems to be common in germany) and although i learned Perl faster apart from school and i think Pascal is terribly ugly, it is a good language to learn the basics. You have to be explicit, you have to predeclare things, you see all stuff that happens. I think Perl is possible to learn as first language (and it's likely to be the last language then :), but you risk to learn a lot of Bad Things that Perl allows you (and beginners often don't see why they should tell perl to restrict them) and nasty Pascal would just not know. Learning Perl after such a scientific language helps you to start and you automatically avoid some mistakes.

But the language you learn is only the one thing, it's also important how you learn it and how busy you are. There are a lot of those "Script Kiddies" around that have learned Perl (and more often their tool is PHP) from bad online tutorials or bad books or even worse scripts and do not know a bit of the CS background and don't want to know and think it's not necessary. I think it's most important.

btw.: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language

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[Adam Kensai]

Thanks for linking to the discussion I mentioned, I've neglected to learn how as of yet. I think that even though you can get into trouble learning Perl it is not a reason not not learn it first. There are horrible tutorials out there that make people practice awful habits - but this is not a reason to not develop a good tutorial that sets a student up with good habits that will mesh well with later learning. ~Adam

[fruiture]

True, but it's incredibly hard to make the superficial believe it's better to program properly than to program awfully like Matt Wright as longs as he's more popular than Larry Wall (in certain "groups" on the web). But these thoughts always end up in what Dave Cross has so perfectly said here.

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