I actually didn't know that, but my knowledge of PHP is clearly a few versions out of date. Thanks for the info!

No, I'm asking people to try to imagine what it's like to be a novice programmer, with all of the computer skills that status likely entails, and then be expected to install an entire LAMP server before you can execute your first line of code.

I think the problem is that we (and by we, I mean food scientists, which I am not) don't know every single thing in every food that provides some benefit or detriment to human health or the necessary proportions to achieve that benefit or detriment.

This is a perfect example of "nutritionism", or the notion that all that matters when it comes to nutrition are calories, fiber and protein grams, and vitamin and mineral content. Unlike Soylent, whole foods offer other beneficial compounds (like phytonutrients and antioxidants) for our health. This is the same reason…

As a bioinformatician I'm hip-deep in Perl every day, and I'm always astonished by the degree to which Perl forces intelligent people to be terrible programmers. As near as I can tell, it all comes down to Larry Wall and his obsessive, idiotic belief that somehow programming would be easier if it encompassed the…

I was perhaps less clear than I intended. There's no particular utility in Java as a first language as opposed to any other; and not insubstantial disutility, as it's actually not trivial to set up a good environment for writing and compiling Java. The Java IDE's ("Integrated Development Environments"; basically, text…

Oof, that's a hell of a hump to have to get over. Compare that with Python, which may already be installed on your system, and whose execution is as simple as "python my_code.py".

But where do you run it? The beginning student can easily execute Python code at the command line, either via the interactive interpreter or by executing Python code in text files.

There's no particular reason that Java, above any other language, teaches you to "think like the computer" - why would it? Your computer isn't thinking in Java.

It's impossible to express in words my distaste for Perl. It's the worst language for teaching programming because so little of what you'll learn will carry over into other languages. Perl teaches anti-programming:

I'm sorry, I just don't follow. I'm looking at Chrome's JavaScript console right now and while it's interactive, there's no place to load and execute code from a text file that I can see. Plus, it's a web browser, so it's completely sandboxed from the filesystem, so I can't use it to do any actual work that isn't web…

Where would you run PHP if someone doesn't hand you the keys to a configured web server?

Actually, any time you program the Arduino, you're doing it in C - Wiring is just a set of libraries. And nothing says you have to use them - if you want, you can access the pin registers directly, read from and write to them, which is actually what's going on under the hood in Wiring. For some operations - like if…

Oh, I didn't actually play with it. Maybe it's bullshit; but then, I feel like if it's bullshit, then somebody would have said so in the comments of one of the six or so blog posts I read about this.

I'm saying that HTML5+CSS3, together and without JavaScript (which is obviously complete on it's own), are a Turing-complete language, and can be used (obliquely) to solve computational problems. This is apparently due to new pseudoclasses in CSS3, based on what I've read.

Justice is only the monopoly of the courts if they're able to provide it. In systems like these, the alternative to vigilantism isn't the rule of law, it's no rule at all.

If a language is Turing-complete, then it can be said to be a programming language. "Turing-completeness" is the property of being mathematically equivalent to a Turing machine.

I used to smile inside every time my very serious professor would say "cooder."

Well, sure. They're philosophical concerns. Programming isn't just a technical act, it's an act of creativity, imagination, and foresight. Anyone can learn a couple of functions and then cut and paste code from stackoverflow, but the act of being a programmer is fundamentally one of design. And fledgling programmers…

Why would you recommend BASIC over Python? If you want to write programs that just fall through, top to bottom, you can do that in Python. If you want to write in a reusable functional or OO style, how do you do that in BASIC?