Re: Quick questions...

Thad Smith wrote
(in article
<43643f2e$0$27310$892e0abb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

>> What course
>> of study did you pursue to get to where you are today?

I think the OP will discover that the answer depends upon the
age of the respondent, and won't be of much use today. He
probably doesn't want to start out with PDP-11 assembler,
Fortran, Snobol, Basic, etc.

>> Would you
>> suggest starting with REALbasic first for a n00b? I am completely new
>> to programming and using a Mac and would like some input as to where to
>> begin a career in programming. I know this is probably a somewhat
>> undefined question, but would appreciate you input/advice. Thanks.
>
> I'm not familiar with what is available on a Mac.

OS X is basically BSD UNIX with a nicer than usual window
manager on top of it. Any language available open source is
pretty much available. Apart from Microsoft proprietary
(despite marketing claims to the contrary) language is available
on it. Many come pre-installed or on the distribution DVD.

> I suggest asking for
> suggestions in a Mac programming newsgroup. Since you asked in
> comp.lang.c, consider C!

True, although as others have said, C probably isn't a great
first language, unless you have a really good teacher. Back in
the day, you started out in assembler first, to understand the
basics of the system, but that doesn't seem to be much in form
any more, and most people /never/ learn the low-level details,
and admittedly don't need to learn them.

For a first language, you might consider something like Ruby,
which is useful for a lot of purposes, relatively clean
syntactically, object-oriented (in a more rational manner than
most) and has a very active development community right now.

--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw





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