[vox] ISO: Good programming language to teach an 8yr old
Norm Matloff
vox@lists.lugod.org
Fri, 19 Mar 2004 13:25:58 -0800
On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 11:44:03AM -0800, donw@examen.com wrote:
> I'm a C guy overall myself, would like Java more if it didn't have such
> shitty memory handling[1] and wasn't so bloody slow, and get huge
Use GCJ, GCC's Java compiler. It compiles Java to native code, so you
should get reasonable speed.
I used to like Java because I hated C++. :-) I felt some desire to do
some things O-O form (again, I'm only lukewarm on O-O), so I turned to
Java, viewing it as having the good things about C++ without the bloat.
But then later I got into Python, which I much prefer to Java. BTW, I
was pleased to see in a recent Eric Raymond interview that he said the
same things (C++ too bloated, Java nice but overpromised, Python is
good).
I disagree on the other point you mentioned, i.e. what language to use
for building large systems. Other than the execution speed issue, I'd
much prefer Python to any of them. I know that some people feel that
one "needs" strong typing in a big project, but personally I consider
that to be dogma.
Norm