Best first programming language to learn?

[Jake]

In order to further testing of the forums and introduce people to some of the exciting options available I've created a poll to help J. S. John sort out the opinions on what the best 1st language is.

Visit the link at the bottom of the post to vote in the poll or view the results!

The poll question is... What is the best 1st programming language to learn for chemistry/biology?

You can pick more than one option. Also anyone else who wants to start polls just use O-Bio.org/forums/
I've got guest poll voting turned on at the moment, so no ballot stuffing!

-Jake
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[JonathanCline]

On Nov 8, 4:37 pm, "Jake" <DIYbio.list.gate...@O-Bio.org> wrote:
>
> The poll question is... What is the best 1st programming language to learn for chemistry/biology?
>
> You can pick more than one option.

The first language should be: a) useful, b) scriptable for rapid
use, c) consistent, d) commonly used. For non-CS people, it should
also be e) easy to learn. For CS-people, it's their major to learn
complex languages, so they can work harder!

As of today's technology, the best option would be python. I would
say Perl, except perl is too lenient on syntax ("do what I mean") so
learning it as a 1st language can cause a lot of debugging headaches
and frustration -- Perl is great as 2nd or 3rd language. Previously,
the 1st language was probably TCL (yuck!). Unfortunately that was the
best available at the time (mid 90s). Thankfully now there's python.

As a runner-up to the above, I would choose MATLAB. MATLAB would be
my first pick to suggest as 1st language for chem/bio, except it is
proprietary, uses base-1 arrays, and has a lot of other funkiness.
So, MATLAB should be a later language. (It could be that R is an
alternative, however people here have made some critical remarks about
R as a language, so it may not be best for 1st one.)

I would not suggest Java because it is not scriptable. However if
learning Java for non-CS types, then the best place to start would be
Processing.org which, frankly, is amazing and a simple way to get
started with small uber-Java programs. For the 2nd language, for chem/
bio types who figure on learning more hardcore CS stuff, I would then
suggest objective-C and iPhone apps. I would also not suggest one
of the obscure-but-maybe-better languages like Lisp, etc -- the most
important thing for non-CS types is that it should be time well spent.

The zeroth language to learn is always /bin/sh.

What I actually see, from reading the scientific community papers, is
a lot of Microsoft Visual Basic in common use. However, that's a
broken language, it's proprietary, it's non-scriptable, completely non-
portable, it will be dead in another 15 years, so it fails on several
fronts.

My first language was Apple ][ basic, then Logo. Logo turned out to
be fairly useless although it had great design plans (ease of
learning, ease of use, ease of graphical output, ease of hooking to
external robots/etc). Processing.org is way, way better.


## Jonathan Cline
## jcl...@ieee.org
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