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Why learn Fortran?Why learn Fortran?Posted Jun 30, 2012 21:30 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Why learn Fortran? by HelloWorld Parent article: Why learn C? (O'Reilly Radar)
Good programmers should learn many programming languages, as such the first one they learn should not need to be the one they will be using to make a living.
C has the advantage that it's small enough that you can teach the complete language in a short time (when was the last time you saw a language book as small as the K&R C book?, or even one only double it's size?)
That's a huge advantage for a first language.
The fact that other languages work differently just means that when you move on to those languages, you should be learning the new stuff, but already have a solid grounding in the basic stuff.
My High School computer classes started by teaching Basic, then had a class in algorithms, and then covered assembly, and only then branched out to other languages. It resulted in a much more solid grounding, and much more flexible thinking than would come out of any of the College programs I have seen.
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Why learn Fortran? Posted Jul 1, 2012 10:45 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> Good programmers should learn many programming languages, as such the first one they learn should not need to be the one they will be using to make a living.
> > C has the advantage that it's small enough that you can teach the complete language in a short time (when was the last time you saw a language book as small as the K&R C book?, or even one only double it's size?) The Little Schemer, the Lua 5.1 Reference Manual. If the goal is to learn programming in general, I'd say that these language make much more sense than C -- no need to bother with memory management, mysterious bugs due to out-of-bounds memory access or C's idiosyncratic syntax and the preprocessor.
On the other hand, if your goal is to learn C++, learning C first doesn't make any sense either due to the reasons mentioned earlier. So unless you actually want to read or write C code, I don't see a reason to learn C.
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