I get what you’re saying, but the onus of structure (v/s spaghetti) is 95% on the instructor and student and 5% on the language. You can write C code all in one method with nothing but GOTOs and it’ll look a lot like BASIC.
Bear in mind, all a shell script is ultimately doing is executing system calls. So to show proficiency in that realm, to me demonstrates a greater understanding of the underlying operating system. In the hundreds of technical interviews I have given over the years, I have never asked someone to write a shell script. However if I turn a candidate loose on a bare 'Nix system, and ask them to solve a programming problem, the person that’s familiar enough to be able to write a shell script will most likely also have a better understanding how to do … well … anything really in that environment. And I do recall a candidate to whom I gave a parsing problem. He realized that he could either write about 30 lines of C code or 3 line script using grep and sed. So he opted for the latter with no guidance from me whatsoever. Yes, he got an offer.
But really what I see everyday at work is the guys that are willing to get their hands dirty with some degree scripting (and not just shell scripting for that matter) are generally far more effective at their jobs even if that job is not software development.
Man, do you need to be fucking vulgar? That is just disgusting.
You’re assuming there is an instructor. That was the problem - those kids were self taught. This was before decent languages were widely and freely available.
In the Computing Surveys issue on structured programming from 1975 or so, Knuth, in his paper, cited a Professor Goto from Japan who wondered why everyone was trying to eliminate him.
All of this is so much easier if you can program. You can script procedural generation, animation, filters - whatever. If all you use is the GUI D&D stuff, you’re stuck with what someone else has written.
I’m most familiar with Blender, which uses Python and can do some fun things., and POVRay, which has it’s own scripting language.
Most any non-BSD Linux flavour will have Python installed out of the box. The rest will have the package.
I feel like we’ve deviated from the spirit of what the original question was. In thinking back on that, I would recommend javascript for a beginner to dabble in. While that may not be the right choice for someone going into programming, it can be a great language for someone who is just going to occasionally write a few simple programs. Javascript is embedded in just about every browser, which means the programs can run anywhere–computer, phone, tablet, etc. Also, it’s simple to have GUI components like buttons, fields, colors, etc. which are more complicated to do in other languages and environments. Javascript tutorials will likely have the student creating a GUI as one of the first tasks. So for someone who may only venture slightly into the world of programming, javascript is a great choice for the flexibility it offers in that case.
The limitations of javascript are that it’s not a good general-purpose language and it will be more problematic if the student is trying to operate on data on their own machine. Because javascript typically runs in the browser, there can be security issues if the programs try to access local files. While there are ways around that, it would probably be better to use a standalone language, like Python, if the student starts running into the limitations of javascript.
I was about to post the same thing.
The nice thing is that you can go to W3Schools.com to both learn and modify the code (they give you little windows where you can modify and execute).
Probably a pretty good way to go because you can easily get some gratification from seeing it run.
Your own posts are the evidence I use against you. And emotion is leading you to double down on repeated errors. I’m trying to be gentle here Stranger, but you’ve had factual mistakes about Excel in each of your posts.
Look, we’ve got a lot to agree on: Matlab is the best-of-class Matrix Laboratory. Python has multi-platform support even better than Matlab, and Excel isn’t even in that race. I’ve already mentioned dataset size, dimension, and skills environment. Why don’t we leave it at that?