What language would you suggest is friendlier, and less rife with gotchas? I find the rules of C fairly reasonable, at least on the surface.
Ruby -- puts "Hello World"
Python -- print "Hello World"
Lua -- print("Hello World")
Personally I wish every programmer would eventually learn C. Getting down to that low level and really understanding how things work is important, but if it is the first language I think we would end up with a whole lot less programmers as many would give up early.
Python is written in C
Lua is written in C
Ruby has also been implemented in Java (JRuby), Ruby (Rubinius), .NET (IronRuby), JavaScript (Opal).
Python in Java (Jython) and .NET (IronPython)
Lua has been implemented in too many language for me to list them all here (C, C++, Lua, JavaScript, Erlang, OCaml, Go, etc...)
It seems C itself was initially bootstrapped from B which was bootstrapped from BCPL. If we were to follow this to it's logical conclusion I'm guessing we end up at some version of Assembly. Are you suggesting we should start budding programmers on Assembly?
You meant Ruby, Python and Lua have their reference implementations written in C. They all also have other implementations written in other languages.
int main(void) {
(* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * printf)("C is awesome\n");
return 0;
} #include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
(* * & * * * * * & * * * * * * * * * * * * * printf)(&1["C is awesome\n"]-3/2);
}