Help! I don't know the language! (fwd)

[Paul Dufresne]

On Fri, Oct 29, 1999 at 11:15:42AM -0700, Tril wrote:
> Subject: Help! I don't know the language!
> 
> Dear sir, 
>     Please, take a moment to respond to my query. I am a beginning
> programmer and wish to take guidance as to which computer language I should
> learn first, second, thrird, etc. I must say that my interest in the matter
> is financial. I do not wish to waste my time or resources learning something
> which there is or will not be a market lucrative enough to support my
> efforts now or in the future. My computer currently is an Apple Blue @ White
> G3 400Mhz PowerPC.

I could not resist to make my suggestion on this one.
My suggestion, that I would not follow myself but I nevertheless
believe to be good, would be drink Java, while eating some Pizza.

The basic idea behind my suggestion: "Worst is better". That
is bad stuff that everybody use finish to become almost as
good as stuff well design in the first place (after new designs
made after seeing the results of bad design), but with better
tools because so much people use it.

Java is the hype, so you will find very good compilers,
libraries,etc for it, and I expect people knowing it to
be popular among employers.

Now the Pizza, it is a language with stuff like functions that
receive and returns functions, this may help you to avoid building
a hierarchy of objects when it would just make stuff harder and
would necessite to draw the same stuff many times only with small
changes. Pizza compile to quite readable JAVA code.

I think the author of Pizza is working on an other kind of Java,
but I don't know if this is suppose to replace the current Pizza.
Anyway, I think we have a link on our page on languages, see
the Review section of http://www.tunes.org.
  
--Paul