3 ms·

Is this a joke? VB may be "easy" but it's terribly verbose. VB 6 was end-of-lifed two years ago. Pascal was a good idea 30 years ago. And Delphi's designer was

by Todd 16y ago

Is this a joke? VB may be "easy" but it's terribly verbose. VB 6 was end-of-lifed two years ago. Pascal was a good idea 30 years ago. And Delphi's designer was hired by MS to build a better language 14 years ago, which became C#. Now, let's look at the languages with momentum. MS has bet the farm on .NET and C# is the primary vehicle. The Mono project is going strong. The most important web programming language (if brain damaged) is PHP. And the language underlying ALL OF COMPUTING AND THE INTERNET is C and C++. Um.

stcredzero 16y ago
The most important web programming language (if brain damaged) is PHP. If we went with "the most important, even if brain damaged" then VB would've been the language of choice years ago. I'd rather go with, "whatever will produce the most savvy programmers." In this light, there are good reasons to pick Scheme. Before that, I would also opt for a simplified assembly language, with a simple compiler targeting that language. For the first intro course, Python isn't a bad choice. Look how many programmers in their 40's got started in BASIC, then graduated to 6502 Assembly.