[vox] ISO: Good programming language to teach an 8yr old

[Norm Matloff]

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