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Comment by brg | Hacker News Reader

What is the best intro language? Perhaps the hallmarks of an intro language should be to teach a user about variables, function calls, conditionals, and loops. For that I think there is still little better than LOGO or BASIC. But to help the begin feel like they are making a change, perhaps Javascript is now the best.

My 'real' intro languages were Pascal and Prolog. Pascal was fine, but prolog was very much a waste of time.

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I'd say Lua. It's simple and well designed.

I think JS is as horrible as C++, since it has all the implicit casting to string rules, besides a lot of other quirks. ( I am not sure which language I would advocate, probably either Python or C, one because of all of the nice features, the other because of the absence of all the features.)

There's no right answer because you might want to teach functional programming stuff first and use something like Scheme.

I would say Python because I think that it offers the best mix between learnability and usefulness.

I would say Python and Ruby but Javascript is getting more popular as a first language, I think mostly because it's easy to make something that looks like something.

Prolog's only a waste of time if you let it be. It's a good introduction to declarative programming and the logic implicit in all other programming.

Also, yes, I'll throw Python out there as the best beginning intro language we have now. It's syntax-light compared to the other languages teachers know, familiar to instructors coming from a Java or C++ background, and, best of all, wasn't designed as a teaching language, so it isn't crippled in bizarre ways.

However, I also think that teaching multiple languages is essential, and they should all be from different families or at least have different features, so Haskell, Prolog, Lisp, Forth, and, yes, C++ should all be in the program.

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