On 2011-03-04, Ed Huntress wrote:

"CaveLamb" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

He's using Windows products, which often have to run all night to give
him a result. There are some minicomputers in the place running on Unix,
but they're reserved for other kinds of computational tasks.


Ed, is this about learning about programming?
or wrangling computers?

He's headed for a PhD in economics, with a master's in math along the way.
His responsibilities at work are evolving. But his interest now is in
learning basic programming, with an eye to learning something useful for his
work. He doesn't really know what he's going to do with it. He does NOT want
to be a professional programmer, although knowing the basics probably will
help him.

BTW -- the mention of "basics" reminds me to strongly advise
*against* learning in BASIC. It teaches bad programming habits, as
Pascal makes it difficult to learn bad programming habits.

Once you know what *good* programming practices are, then you
can consider using BASIC. I started in assembly language for the
Motorola 6800 and 6809 CPUs (even more possible to do bad things there,
but more work to write and faster running), then went to BASIC, because
that was what was available for the system which I was then running. No
floppies, no hard disk, just punched tape, and later a digital cassette
tape drive which I interfaced to the system (and wrote the control
software for). (This was in the 6800, I later had floppies for that and
floppies plus hard discs for the 6809 systems.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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