From: MRH <mauriceroman@...>
Date: 2008-05-29T21:49:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Should I Learn Ruby as a First Language?


> And while learning Latin, might help some learn French up to a point,
> I'd argue that knowledge of one language can also interfere REALLY
> learning another, related or not, if one can't accept that the second
> language really doesn't operate exactly like the other.
> While Latin had a large influence on the evolution of French, it's
> only one influence.  This is true, I suspect to an even larger degree
> to English, which was influenced by a long succession of native
> tongues and the tongues of various conquerors and invaders.
>
> There's a long history of English grammarians clinging to the myth
> that English grammar must follow Latin grammar, leading to bogus rules
> like the injunction against splitting an infinitive, which is common
> in English usage, but impossible in Latin since the infinitive is a
> single word.  Yes, if Star Trek were translated to latin, something
> would have to be done with "To boldly go,..." but in English it's
> perfectly good and understandable usage IMHO.
>
> The concerns when programming in a low-level language like C are quite
> different than those when programming in a higher-level language like
> Ruby.  In C one must worry about issues like storage management,
> ensuring that one doesn't copy the wrong kind of data from one
> variable to another, possibly causing buffer overflow or underflow,
> confusing a pointer with data, etc.  All on top of (or perhaps
> beneath) application level concerns.
>
> It seems to me that people who start with a language like C are much
> more likely to be overly concerned about the problems they've
> encountered coming out of these low-level technical concerns, which
> for the most part are handled by the language and its runtime rather
> than the programmer in a language like Ruby leading to stilted,
> chicken-typed code.
>
> This is not to say that it's a bad think to learn C, or Latin.  But I
> firmly believe that for most people this should come later as a way to
> expand understanding of how higher-level languages are implemented and
> extended, not as a first step to inform how one should think about
> higher-level languages.

Hi Rick,

Thank you for this post.

Coming from a self taught background in Languages, and being
bilingual, I can see what you mean, and will keep this in mind.

Regards,

Maurice