Elysian Shadows

Would it be a stupid decision to learn Pascal as my first language?

Well I'm not too experienced but from what I've heard Pascal is an alright way to start programming; its not the worst but it's probably not the best. If you want to program for game design, I'd recommend going with Falco's suggestions, either a game specific language, or C/++. If you haven't already watched his "How to get into Game Development" series, you should go watch it to get the gist of what you should do.

bulls.bears2011 wrote:Would it be a stupid decision to learn Pascal as my first language?

Absolutely not. Pascal is a great language to learn basic programming concepts. It's not object oriented, but it allows you to focus on learning conditional logic, data types, and the concept of procedures. Aside from tinkering with QBasic, Pascal was my first programming language.

I once wrote Frogger in Pascal, so anything's possible.

I would definitely recommend learning Pascal over anything like Visual Basic for your first language. In my opinion it teaches far better programming techniques.

dandymcgee wrote:I would definitely recommend learning Pascal over anything like Visual Basic for your first language. In my opinion it teaches far better programming techniques.

werd. One of my buddies at work learned on VB. I still give him crap to this day.

trufun202 wrote: werd. One of my buddies at work learned on VB. I still give him crap to this day.

Learning it's one thing.. learning it as a first language on the other hand >.O I've seen the results first-hand.

Yeah, I agree that your first language can kind of screw you. I mean, it's good to learn, but if it has no relevance to the real world, then there's no point. I hear people wanting to do game development through VB which, if that's your cup of tea that's fine, but don't think that you'll be getting a game dev job using that. You have to conform a bit to what the industry wants, it's simple as that. You do 5 years of VB, that won't help you very much when you try and jump into C++ and don't think you can easily jump from C++ to C, it's possible, but hard because I know, my school took me from BASIC to C++. Then I went to college, went from another form of BASIC, then ASM, then C, then C++. Now I feel more rounded, I can hold my own in a C environment(and not be completely scared away by ASM), but before it was hard.

I wonder if it's at all good for a new person to start out with scripting languages. I haven't used them heavily, I use VB scripts during my IT job and this book I'm working through for my game engine will implement LUA, so I'll start on that soon enough, but I don't know enough to say, yeah start there. I do know that some entry level-esque positions at game dev jobs will have you using scripting languages to makes tools as if to say, "Here, start here and try not to hurt yourself."

trufun202 wrote:

dandymcgee wrote:I would definitely recommend learning Pascal over anything like Visual Basic for your first language. In my opinion it teaches far better programming techniques.

werd. One of my buddies at work learned on VB. I still give him crap to this day.

we use VBA at college... don't ask me why, it's fairly horrible, but it is designed with the beginner in mind, but what really ticks me off in VBA is that they dont have increment operators!

you have to write

i = i + 1 instead of i++, ++i (depending on if you want to evalute after or before) or i+= 1

also, something thats quite funny, I always put semicolons after my code in VBA, and I get an ineviatable error :P (bad C++ habits!)

back on topic... I've never used pascal, but from what i've read about it, people say it's a good entry level language, and if it isn't object oriented, then that might be a better place to start, so you end up understanding core programming principles before going into OOP

i personally think pascal is a great language to learn on. its very powerful. has pointers.

and just remember this. when you start programming its not really important what language,
but rather that you push yourself to learn programming concepts like design patterns, like singelton, stategy, factory. ect.
and learn data structures like trees, tries. hoffman trees. quadtrees, oct trees. learn about computational complexity and
to make a problem simpler.

getting information on pascal might be harder than some other language. but its still a awesome lang. try Delphi, which is basically the VB of pascal.
but much better. i think there is a game called soldat, and i believe it was made in delphi. check it out. its pretty wicked.

Any lower level language is good for beginners, also as it teaches the basic programming principles.

danR369 wrote:Any lower level language is good for beginners, also as it teaches the basic programming principles.

actually its reversed around. lower means heading in the direction of assembly, that i would not recommend for a beginner, maybe doing that along side something like C yes. but alone. no.

you can learn any programming concept in a language like C.

if you really wanna get snazzy, you can write librady functions in ASM, link them with C, and use them in the C program. but really, these days compilers are so good, that if you arent awesome at ASM, the compiler will most likely make a better ASM build for yoou.