From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!zehntel!sytek!menlo70!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!cca!ima!inmet!ramsey Newsgroups: net.lang Title: Re: Re: Bad Habits from Interps - (nf) Article-I.D.: inmet.47 Posted: Mon Mar 21 03:24:22 1983 Received: Thu Mar 24 07:43:01 1983 #R:cbosgd:-326900:inmet:4700003:000:877 inmet!ramsey Mar 19 18:52:00 1983 I just had to comment on this comment: ---------- I know some of you out there think LISP is wonderful. I'm very happy for you. But I think you are in the minority. And I don't think LISP is a good teaching tool, primarily because it relies on recursion too much. Recursion is a VERY hard thing for a beginner to learn. (This same argument applies to LOGO as well.) ---------- I have taught short courses in LISP, BASIC and Pascal to beginners. Beginners seem to have as much trouble dealing with loops as they do with recursion. Teaching recursion is only a problem when you are dealing with someone who already knows how to program in a non-recursive language. You can always tell someone who learned to program in LISP (or LOGO) late in life, their programs look like FORTRAN with lots of extra parentheses. Marc Ramsey