Glenn Reynolds talks about a shortage of geeks and one of his readers comments that a key contribution to this is when computers stopped shipping with BASIC. Glenn makes the plea to computer makers to include BASIC on the computers as a public service. Of course, Macs already ship with both Python and Ruby, surely superior languages to BASIC and excellent learning languages as well.
On a Mac, all you have to do is fire up a terminal (Apple Key + Space Bar and then type “Terminal”), type “python” in the new terminal and you have a place to start learning programming. Work through the Python tutorial and you’re well on the way to becoming a novice Python programmer.
Of course, on a Windows machine you’re going to have to do a little more work because, well, it is Windows after all.
January 19, 2010 at 12:47 pm
It’s easy enough to learn on Windows. Sure you have to download a free version of Visual Studio.. but after that there are plenty of tutorials. Ruby and Python are nice languages also.
January 20, 2010 at 9:34 am
I agree that it’s not hard but it’s not as simple as it is on a Mac. Plus there is a certain level of overhead to Visual Studio (intentionally of course, it’s meant for a different audience) compared to the command line interpreter of Python or Ruby.
I with Microsoft would include either of those already built in. Python was designed as a teaching language and I think it serves that purpose well.