There are two big points I can't *believe* about this post !
1 - recommending people to learn C early - no ! If you must learn imperative programming (and most of us sadly do), learn Pascal first - that's what it was meant for, after all. Do C later when you can get your head around dealing with pointers, the way C makes you do stupidly early on the learning curve.
2 - and I quote, ". In a way, its wordiness is its strength, and it is difficult to produce 'sloppy' code the way it is possible to do in, for example, C." WHAAAAAT !?!?! You've obviously never tried to untangle 1971-era COBOL code written to the then existing IBM coding standards (ha !) 25 years after it was written and mangled in various ways !! Paragraphs with useful names like "P3J2" - a coordinate in a flowchart diagram (Page 3, J-2), bejaysus !
I have to admit that the last programming language that really made me go "yow !" was Prolog, and that was about 14 years ago. Everything else pretty much splits into a couple of camps - the imperative and the applicative. Apart from some playing around the edges, that's about it. And yes, I am including the object oriented languages in there. (As far as I'm concerned, object orientation is just good old fashioned Abstract Data Types plus some dynamic behaviour on creation/destruction - the actual code you write is still good old imperative.)
My list to learn would be :
1. Pascal (imperative)
2. Haskell (lazy applicative)
3. Standard ML (strict applicative)
4. Prolog (logic/declarative)
5. Java (I'll have to name something commercially useful !)
The "Life is Too Short For This Pointless Pain" List:
1. BASIC
2. FORTRAN
3. COBOL
4. C
5. C++ (by extension from 4)
and that's before we get to the "scripting" languages....
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There are two big points I can't *believe* about this post !
1 - recommending people to learn C early - no ! If you must learn imperative programming (and most of us sadly do), learn Pascal first - that's what it was meant for, after all. Do C later when you can get your head around dealing with pointers, the way C makes you do stupidly early on the learning curve.
2 - and I quote, ". In a way, its wordiness is its strength, and it is difficult to produce 'sloppy' code the way it is possible to do in, for example, C." WHAAAAAT !?!?! You've obviously never tried to untangle 1971-era COBOL code written to the then existing IBM coding standards (ha !) 25 years after it was written and mangled in various ways !! Paragraphs with useful names like "P3J2" - a coordinate in a flowchart diagram (Page 3, J-2), bejaysus !
I have to admit that the last programming language that really made me go "yow !" was Prolog, and that was about 14 years ago. Everything else pretty much splits into a couple of camps - the imperative and the applicative. Apart from some playing around the edges, that's about it. And yes, I am including the object oriented languages in there. (As far as I'm concerned, object orientation is just good old fashioned Abstract Data Types plus some dynamic behaviour on creation/destruction - the actual code you write is still good old imperative.)
My list to learn would be :
1. Pascal (imperative)
2. Haskell (lazy applicative)
3. Standard ML (strict applicative)
4. Prolog (logic/declarative)
5. Java (I'll have to name something commercially useful !)
The "Life is Too Short For This Pointless Pain" List:
1. BASIC
2. FORTRAN
3. COBOL
4. C
5. C++ (by extension from 4)
and that's before we get to the "scripting" languages....