ActionScript as a teaching language

[Zoltan]

Stewart C. Russell wrote:

> 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.

What about Javascript running on FireFox 1.5 (this gives you a de-bugger 
and graphics via <canvas> and SVG)?

Zoltan

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