-=> Dennis Brown wrote to All <=-

 DB> The guy told the caller that they should start off in Cobol,

He sounds as bad as OUR computer call-in show guy. :-/

 DB> since that is what colleges start new students in to get them
 DB> familiar with the programming concept.

Totally wrong. He seems to be thinking of Pascal, which was designed as a
teaching langauge. There's also BASIC -- Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code -- but few today would recommend starting there. (It IS
easy to start with; it's just that many feel it encourages bad habits.)

 DB> The caller asked if she wouldn't be better off getting a good C or
 DB> Assembly tutorial from the local library and start learning at that
 DB> stage?

It sounds like she already knows more than the host. But it would crazy to
start with assembly language (the hardest of all).

 DB> He said that Cobol is the only "sensible starting point." True or
 DB> not?

It's bullshit.

 DB> I haven't tried Cobol as a starting point...should I?

No. COBOL is a dying language... The only thing is, there's a high demand
for COBOL programmers right now, to fix the Y2K bugs introduced by earlier
COBOL programmers. (The largest portion of programs afflicted with these
bugs seem to be in COBOL; partly because of its age, and partly because it
encourages the use of decimal numbers for dates.) I guess that demand will
fade in about 14 months, though. ;-)

It's a simple enough language, I guess -- or at least, easy to read. It's
so verbose that it looks like English. But it's weighed down by its
punched-card heritage, and it's not flexible or powerful.

Mind you, I think of COBOL as a great historical achievement. With the
emphasis on "historical".

... Dirty Harry of Borg:  "Go ahead... resist us."
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