The worst language to learn programming from:

[1337455 10534]

I have seen this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=641120. But my question may be one of a more serious nature.

My high school is teaching kids Scheme as their first language. Any thoughts?

To demonstrate;

;; This must be done in the IDE
;; (2r^2 * .5h^3)/(3r8h^1/2)
(define (thing r h) ((/ (* (* 2 (expt r 2)) (* .5 (expt h 3))) (* (* 3 r) (* 8 (sqrt h))))
(thing 1 2)
;; In Python for eg:
; thing = lambda r,h: (2(r**2) * .5(h**3))/(3r * 8(h**.5))
; thing(1,2)

Scheme may teach you things about structure, but it has 0 real life use... Any defense for Scheme?

[sryth]

My opinion is simply going to be that, my opinion. But I think it is an excellent choice.

Learning Scheme teaches students to think in a mindset conducive to programming. Everything is data, everything is a list, from primitive to procedure definition, everything else is mere abstraction. This is true in every language, but it is most accessible in that format in scheme/lisp. Learning scheme will make anyone a better programmer, and make learning any other language much easier, no matter where you are in programming knowledge.

As far as real world use, yes, I prototype in scheme at times, it can be the easiest way to knock something out quickly. Scheme is a very active language and has a good community behind it. http://www.plt-scheme.org for more info and check out the DrScheme IDE. Nice stuff.

Scheme is also experiencing an upsurge due to the new r6rs standards being discussed/formalized. These will standardize the various dialects a good bit and make commercial applications a lot less leery of using it.

You may feel that it is a bad language to start out with, but personally I think that is probably because you have learned other languages first and have habits and preconceptions based on those languages, as a first language I don't think it'll be a problem.

[InfinityCircuit]

C++

http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/

[euler_fan]

I have a professor who is a major Fortan user who is teaching an applied math course using Mathematica of all things. His defense of Mathematica (despite almost none of us using it after his course) is--paraphrasing of course--this:

It's just as important you learn how to learn a language as to learn a language you will use. In the real world, you won't always be given a choice about what language or software to use, so having experience learning a new language from scratch is a very useful skill.

I tend to agree. When learning to program the choice of language should ultimately support teaching not only the right mindsets and skill sets but also how to learn a language. If brain**** serves the point of the class, I would expect to see it used (in the absence of at least better named languages) even though it serves almost no practical value.