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The first programming language I learned was Scheme, as taught in CS61A at UC Berkeley. It opened my eyes to the beauty of programming. I had classmates who bl
by sthatipamala 6y ago
The first programming language I learned was Scheme, as taught in CS61A at UC Berkeley. It opened my eyes to the beauty of programming.
I had classmates who blew it off as a useless course because they already knew Java and PHP. It was their loss; they don't have the same fascination with computer science and I can directly attribute it to not getting exposed to Scheme/Lisp.
- outworlder 6y agoIt is very difficult to get excited when your first exposure to a language consists in "Please ignore this public static void main() {} business, all this will become clear by the end of the course. Maybe. If we have time to cover it all. Just copy and paste for now. Don't forget the semicolons". Also all the configuring of the development environment. IDEs, runtimes and the like. Scheme runtimes tend to be both very lightweight, run anywhere, and they give you a REPL. So you can immediately start experimenting. Things like Javascript and Python you give you some of that experience out of the box too (and Python gives you more libraries) - but you'll need to learn a bunch of syntax first. And most of that syntax is arbitrary and not relevant to the problems being solved at all. Scheme and Lisp have a strong mathematical background so, just like math, they end up being elegant.