D vs Java as a first programming language

[Jim Hewes]

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I know BASIC and Microsoft are probably scorned here, but in this situation 
Visual Basic might be worth considering at least. Students can download the 
Express Edition for free ( http://www.microsoft.com/Express/VB/ ) and have a 
complete development environment. And there are some tutorials there to get 
started.

I wouldn’t recommend future developers bother with it. But since these 
students are biologists and not future software engineers, it may not be so 
important that they avoid a “bad” language that they will have to unlearn 
later. In the future they’ll just want something that they can use to 
quickly and easily get something done. A lot of people use VB to get things 
done.

Having said that, I haven’t actually tried VB Express Edition to see how 
easy it is. But I use Visual Studio every day for C++ and some C# and it’s a 
decent environment. In the old days, before C became popular, BASIC was one 
of the first languages I used and I don’t think it screwed me up too badly 
(although I guess that’s open for argument :-) ) In any case, it’s probably 
a good idea to use a dynamically-typed language.

I used Scheme for a while in college many years ago and while it’s a good 
thing to teach programmers, at the time I found it hard to debug. We had no 
step debugger for it. Maybe things have improved since then. But I think the 
tools and environment you have to work with can be important too, not just 
the language itself. It’s harder to learn something in a limited amount of 
time when you have to struggle with the tools.

Jim

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