ActionScript as a teaching language

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 08:21:03AM -0500, 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)

But then won't it be harder to teach them proper coding later when types
matter?  Strongly typed languages help avoid many bugs since the
compiler just won't accept the code in most cases if it isn't right.

>  * flexible and obvious data structure definition/use (I love Perl's
>    flexibility here, but the syntax would be odious to explain)

Did you just use perl and obvious in the same sentenc?  Flexible yes,
obvious no.  Downright confusing and insanity inducing in some cases.

>  * 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.

python + wxwindows perhaps?

Len Sorensen
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