Re: Trying to learn programing

[Peter Tury]

Hi,

for Windows I suggest to try EmacsW32 on
http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html. It has a conventional Windows
install .exe (the ~22MB file in http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/DL/EmacsW32/)
as well as an extremly fine description of the whole building process (from
"what is needed exactly and how to download it"...)
(http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html). (I think this latter
stuff might be interesting for you only later.) Also it is very up-to-date.


It's nice, if you want to learn programming. IMHO one of the first and most
important thing to decide what is your aim: to learn something what makes
it easier to find a job later (this will result more programming language
learning and less programming learning) or just learning programming (means
mostly programming, less programming language learning) l'art pour l'art,
for fun. In the first case, C (or C++ or Java) is a good choice.

In the other case, learning 

Emacs programming (=Emacs Lisp, aka elisp) (e.g.:
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/emacs-lisp-intro/emacs-lisp-intro_toc.html:
"This text is written as an elementary introduction for people who are not
programmers") or

Scheme (e.g. http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/drscheme/tour/ ("DrScheme
is an interactive, integrated programming environment designed specifically
with the needs of beginners in mind") inside http://www.plt-scheme.org/) or

Mozart (http://www.mozart-oz.org/) are very good choices.

There is a great book about many modern aspects of programming: "Concepts,
Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" (you can download its
pre-print version from
http://web.archive.org/web/20040202004840/http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/book.html
, search for "Online book"). You can try the examples in the book and
program in Mozart using Emacs and the mozart-related extension
(http://www.mozart-oz.org/download/view.cgi).

Each of the last 3 examples (Emacs Lisp, Scheme and Mozart) has its own
evironment, in which you can compile and debug easily... (They are more or
less standalone: you don't need anything else for developing in them...)

Br,
P