Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Wed 28th Jul 2004 17:23 UTC
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
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I remember the days of hobbyist computing in the 1980s, with all the various versions of BASIC that started right up and gave you all sorts of neat power. The author presents numerous environments here, but few of them (as far as I can tell) are INTERPRETED languages. If you really want to experiment with what a computer can do, you need to have an interpreted language that does some neat things right out of the box and that comes with a solid manual with short but fun programs. Most of the environments he presents -- for C#, Java, C++ -- are based on compile-only languages, and in any case it's a bit of a chore to get them to do anything fun, and the manuals don't come with program listings that will do anything fun.
I don't know enough about VisualBasic to know whether it's as easy as the BASICs of yore, so maybe that would be a nice start. But the author doesn't describe it much.
C++ programming seems to be the top dog programming language in the world today. Everyone seems to love C++. C++ is the cadillac of the development world. Its fairly simple to learn, not as simple as C# or Visual Basic, but if you ae a quick learner you will pick it up in no time.
C++ is not fairly simple to learn, unless you're talking about the simplest, most mundane features of C++. Other languages that are far simpler to learn, that don't require bizarre features such as copy constructors and C-style pointers, and that come standard with a "safer" environment. Eiffel comes to mind, as does Logo (although Logo is generally less useful). If I knew anything about scripting languages, I'd probably mention a few of those. THAT'S where hobbyists ought to be looking to learn some programming.
All IMHO of course.