Subj : Re: Four Programming Questions To : comp.programming From : beliavsky Date : Tue Jul 12 2005 09:27 am jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net wrote: > Gerry Quinn wrote: > > In article , ballensr@adelphia.net > > says... > > > > > Question one: Which language (basic, C++, java, etc) is easiest for learning > > > computer programming? > > > > Probably a traditional Basic. > > Basic is certainly easy to learn. It also supports and somewhat > encourages bad programming practices. Modularity is very difficult > in traditional Basic. Compound data types, other than arrays, > are not allowed in traditional Basic. The dreaded "goto" is almost > required in traditional Basic. I think Visual Basic for Applications, which anyone owning Excel has access to, does not have these problems. But VBA != traditional Basic. > Pascal was designed to be a better first programming language. > Pascal supports modularity and compound data types. > > Ada provides a syntax very similar to Pascal with an improved type > system. While Ada is a much bigger language than Pascal, there > is a subset of Ada which is very similar to Pascal. A beginning > programmer should learn that subset first, then graduate to more > advanced topics such as generics, tasking, andlow level data > representations. A subset of Fortran 95 that enforces structured programming is F, with free compilers available from http://www.fortran.com/F/ . I think it's similar in spirit to Pascal, but it can also be used for real-world scientific programming. .