Re: Beginner to programming. References to understand terms.

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> If I had my way, beginners to programming would learn Pascal first,
> in more or less its original form.

I did program Pascal in the original form, and it did liberate me from
Fortran-thinking.

But it isn't a good introduction to Lua ;)  For one thing, static
typing is extra overload for beginners, and second, the concepts don't
match over that very well.

Loops, conditionals, blocks, lexical scoping, functions, etc are all
present in particularly clear forms in Lua. But  I think there's room
for a very gentle intro that doesn't assume the shared vocabulary of
programming.