in reply to Re: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language in thread Learning Perl as a First (programming) language
I think English is not a good first language. Sure, there might be a few successes, but just go read
any usenet group for a month and see how often and horribly it can go wrong.
English is a powerful, but dangerous language. We don't learn people how to drive using a Ferrari,
people don't learn to fly in an F-16 jet, nor do people learn programming by implementing machine translation systems.
Why should natural languages be any different? It's good to have training wheels.
Many language IMO are much more suited to learn a language. To name a few:
Latin, Classical Greek and Hebrew. Probably Classical Chinese as well.
English is not suitable for everyone. In fact, I believe that more than 75% of the people currently speaking
English should be using a different language (or maybe not even speak at all). Using English as a first
language only increases the number of bad English speakers, further clogs forums like
comp.lang.perl.misc and contributes to the bad name Perl already has.
Hanamaki
Re: Re: Re: Learning English as a First (natural) language
by BUU (Prior) on Aug 02, 2002 at 17:20 UTC
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It's a good thought, but english is a bloody confusing language. Much more so then other 'romance' languages and derivatives, as english's 'syntax' is semi-random and it takes years of speaking it to even get close to being fluent. | [reply] |
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