Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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> If there was though, it'd be Ruby. ;)

I know you're being tongue-in-cheek with that, but I think there are three distinct use cases for learning to program.

For people who want to learn CS from a ground-up, theoretical foundation, Lisp is a nice choice. It is very easy to teach functional programming while simultaneously teaching the fundamentals of theoretical computer science, so you get the best of both.

For people who want a bit more 'traditional' approach, and also want to learn about computer science from a low-level perspective, C is a good choice. It teaches memory management and gives an insight into computer hardware & systems that higher-level scripting languages don't. (This latter part is where Java fails - how can you appreciate references and garbage collection until you've mucked around with pointers and malloc() in C?)

For people who just want to dabble in programming, or for people without a mathematical background, or for people who just want to prototype small projects quickly... then yes, scripting languages like Ruby (or Python) would be the 'best' way.

As you said, languages are like tools, but I think these three categories of tools cover the majority of use-cases nowadays for the beginning programmer.

I'd add a fourth use case (which is somewhat similar to case three). People who don't want to be "programmers", but just want to learn how to simplify and optimize the normal day to day tasks they do. In that case I'd recommend whatever scripting language is standard in whatever app they use. For example I know people who probably would never claim to be programmers and never had any desire to learn programming for programming's sake, but have still taught themselves to do pretty advanced stuff in VBA, AutoCAD Lisp or MEL (Maya's scripting language) because they saw how much easier it made their work.

Well, I suppose I fall into this category: I'm a grad student in the humanities, with a fair bit of math background which I don't actively use in my work (apart from some simple statistics), and I mostly program to automate away things that take too much time otherwise. I was taught Pascal in college, but in a "monkey see monkey do" way (for instance, we did implement linked lists, but nobody really explained pointers to us, it was just "put a star there and it'll work"); later I picked up Python and also did a Django project. However, via a friend I discovered Common Lisp and I have never looked back; I just find it comes very naturally to me.

Still, I agree that something like Python is a very suitable language for somebody who just needs to simplify their lives. (At my old school they've switched from Pascal to C# now... why?)

RMS has an interesting anecdote about this in his speech on Emacs:

"[Bernie Greenberg] wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program."

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

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