[quote name='Rybo5001' timestamp='1337947348' post='4943203']
[quote name='Serapth' timestamp='1337431887' post='4941421']
learning C is not a great starter language
Totally disagree with this, C was my first language and learning the hard stuff first makes every language after that so much easier (especially since you understand what's going on beneath the syntax)
[/quote]
This is one of those baffling pieces of logic I see recurrent among ( pro and prospective ) game developers. Think about this for a moment, with every other topic you can imagine for which formal instruction exists... do you EVER start off hard to make the easier stuff later seem easier?
No, you don't. You start learning math by learning your numbers and sums and progress from there. You don't start with calculus! When learning to cook, you don't start with a souffle. If you pick up a chiltons manual to fix your car, does it start off with engineering an engine? Do interns start with open heart surgery? You don't learn English by reading great literary works, you start with the basics, like Mr Muggs goes to School and Red Shoe, Blue Shoe, Green Shoe, MooShoo.
This whole meme of starting with the hard stuff to make the easy stuff easier is so patently wrong in 99.999999% of endeavers, what exactly makes computer science so unique as to buck the trend.
Here's a hint. Nothing.
Starting hard is just a bad way to waste your time. Don't get me wrong, you can do it, it's just certainly not a productive way to go about things, as millennia of teaching experience has already taught us.
Now, you could argue if C is hard or not, but that's a completely different conversation.
[/quote]
I agree whole-heartedly. I started with VBasic, for a little while, and was like "this is slow, I bet I'll get great much faster by going with C++!". I took a beating. For a beginner, something like Python, or VB, or a scripting language is great, because printing something to the screen. Is print "hello, world". You don't sit there and scratch your head trying to figure out what the cryptic method calls are, and what an include statement is. It's possible to do it. I probably could have. However I'm glad I stepped back from that and went to Python for a while. With the little time I initially spent with C++, I felt like I was backpedaling the entire time, just so I could glimpse the top of the mountain.