which progrraming language to learn first

[Mustafa Abbasi]

so python or perl is the way to go.
essnetially i was looking into shell scripting and found it interesting so i 
thought i'd 
like a crack at that.
any way i tihnk i'll go with perl since you said such nice things about and 
especcially 
if it can help me with php and shell scripting.
also i am going to apply to US colleges this year and i've heard (from 
siblings) that stuff like this really helps.(is this true??)

On 7/15/05, Stephen R Laniel <steve at laniels.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 10:33:06PM +0500, Mustafa Abbasi wrote:
> > i was thinking C or visual basic but i am not sure if visual basic can 
> be used
> > in linux ( can it???)
> 
> VB is a Microsoft thing. I don't see why it *couldn't* work
> under Linux; it seems like a fairly platform-independent
> object model, but then again I have little experience with
> it. Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) has
> Excel- and Word-specific object models. VBA is actually
> pretty awesome: when Excel came out, it pretty well
> annihilated the crappy macro language inside of Lotus 1-2-3.
> But I digress.
> 
> > are these easy to learn, if only at the begginer level.
> > is there some place that would offer me a certificate for completing 
> this
> > thing.
> 
> I'd suggest Perl. It gives you shell-programming experience,
> and it's also the basis for a large portion of the websites
> out there. Plus Perl is very much like PHP, I'm told (I do
> all my web stuff in Perl, not PHP), so it probably buys you
> PHP without much work.
> 
> I've also found that Perl has the smallest gap between "what
> comes to the programmer's head" and "what the programmer has
> to type". Here's how you'd convert all instances of
> <b>[Some text]</b> in a given document into
> <strong>[Some text]</b>:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use strict;
> use warnings;
> my $infile = join '',<>;
> $infile =~ s|<b>(.*?)</b>|<strong>$1</strong>|gsmi;
> print $infile;
> 
> Now if you save that as 'progname.pl', you can run
> 
> progname.pl testfile.html
> 
> and get the converted file on standard output. Six lines to
> do a basic task that *should* take only six lines. Try doing
> this in C.
> 
> I've heard Python is very good, too, and cleaner that Perl.
> It's supposed to be a better language for object-oriented
> programming.
> 
> One question is: what do you want to do with the languages
> you learn? C is best for low-level programming that requires
> you to play directly with RAM. C++ is more object-oriented,
> but is really a hack -- a good hack, though. (Check out
> Stroustrup's "The Design and Evolution of C++" to understand
> why it works the way it does. He had no choice.)
> 
> The whole world really ought to be OOP, except for a small
> number of people who need low-level hardware access. So you
> probably ought to learn Python or C++.
> 
> --
> Stephen R. Laniel
> steve at laniels.org
> +(617) 308-5571
> http://laniels.org/
> PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
> 
> 
> BodyID:11027948.2.n.logpart (stored separately)
> 
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> 
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