ActionScript as a teaching language

[Stewart C. Russell]

While I'm normally a huge awk booster, and my awk-fu skills get heavy 
use in meteorological data munging, it wouldn't make a very good 
general-purpose first language. Its operational mode (basically, execute 
this program for every line of the input) only works well for text 
stream processing.

If your learners are doing that, it's a very quick language to 
teach/learn. I used to teach it to lexicographers for processing 
dictionary text, and they always astonished me how well they took to it.

If I were to be teaching a language, I'd want:
  * block structure
  * painless associative arrays/hashes (computers aren't just about
    numbers)
  * typelessness, for the most part (1 equals "1"; don't make me
    have to worry about details)
  * flexible and obvious data structure definition/use (I love Perl's
    flexibility here, but the syntax would be odious to explain)
  * simple graphics capabilities (maybe I'm showing my age here, but
    the ability to draw stuff without having to worry about OS
    dependencies would be a big help; people like pretty pictures)
  * copious and sensible debugging/error messages.

OO and other dogma can come later. This would be for teaching regular 
folks (not computer-scientists-to-be) that you can make computers do the 
things that you want, not just obey some application's set of rules.

Incidentally, I haven't yet found one language that does all that, and 
I've been looking for about 20 years. In my mind, I'm seeing a Perl/GFA 
Basic/PostScript sort-of hybrid, and it's looking just as nasty to me as 
it does to you.

cheers,
  Stewart
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