Programming languages for beginners

I wonder if a REPL might be counterproductive in a first language. Everyone seems to agree that the ability to produce a "thing" quickly and easily is important. In contrast every time I see an tutorial or introduction to a language with a REPL making a thing is always de emphasized in preference for showing off the language facilities.

Well except Logo which was all about making art "things."

Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but didn't QBASIC actually have a REPL?

I did a (very shallow) evaluaton of the usual suspects in a private email not too long ago, but these things tend to be...well, shallow and very subjective. Great for creating flamewars, but not great for figuring out what to emphasize.

Also an observation I have made is that a lot of people who give advice on how to learn programming didn't learn programming the way they recommend. Well, at least not the programmers I know -- which may or may not be representative of larger populations.

For instance, I learned ver low level languages early; after basic I learned Z80 and x86 assembler and I regularly wrote whole sections of programs in inline assembly (well, hexadecimal op codes) when i learned Pascal later. I understood things like pointers, registers, stacks and clock cycles.

Today most people (including me) will say that people should focus on higher level languags first. To spend more time focusing on very basic language concepts and develop an understanding of algorithms and structure. But during job interviews I've come across candidates that make me doubt this. It is quite common to come across people who can't, say, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much memory a given data structure will consume for N elements of average size M. One candidate even said that he believed that an object reference in Java was "about one byte long". (And yes, I did ask how many bits in case he confused it with "word length").

(Of course, with "high level" I am not suggesting that you should start introducing closures, type inference and various scoping types the first week. People need a bit of background to find those concepts meaningful)

It Logo and VBA meet "my criteria" I must be terribly bad at getting my point across.

Kinda suprised to see a random blog post by me end up on Hacker News. If I had known I would have made more of an effort :-)

PHP certainly is instant gratification, but its marriage to the web server sort of makes it a bit domain specific (though, it is possible to use it outside the web sever. it just never caught on). mostly I do not recommend PHP because it is messy. there are far better languages that share similar syntax that are cleaner, more consistent and have both better libraries an better mechanisms for managing libraries.

one of the languages I specifically was thinking of as a bit annoying is Java. before you are good to go, you need to set up the JVM, sort out your classpath ("help! what's a classpath!?"). then, when you are ready to program you instantly have to think in terms of classes and you are thrust head first into what "static" means etc. and dear god what a bucketload of frustration you are in for if you ask for advice and end up trying to make heads or tails or Eclipse or, god forbid, Maven.