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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Now, take the next step
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Ok, this is interesting. Have a look at this post from Don Box. In a discussion about what language to use to teach his kids to program, he mentions Lisp, ML, Smalltalk, and Ruby. Then he explains why C# and Java are absent from the list:
There are some conspicuous absences from this list. I don't care if any of my three kids ever grok the difference between an abstract class and an interface or between a pointer and a reference, so languages like C++, C#, Java, and VB.NET are out. Honestly, if the industry is still forcing programmers to ask these kinds of questions by the time the next generation of programmers comes to the table, I'll consider my generation to have really squandered an opportunity.
My plan is to learn Ruby and relearn Smalltalk to inform my decision. In the meantime, comments or flames (public or private) from the Peanut Gallery are most appreciated.
Now, the obvious next question is - if those languages are too complex for teaching programming to kids, why are they useful for doing productive development work? Does anyone need that level of complexity?
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