What programming language should EE's learn first?

I learned C by reading books and writing code but I had to take a couple of courses to get a handle on C++. If I hadn't learned C first I might have been able to learn C++ on my own because I've learned all the other languages rather quickly, and on my own. Java is very much like C but safer. If you really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of the hardware you will not be able to avoid C/C++. C is not too hard to learn but can get a newbie into a lot of trouble, but only once you get into pointers and a lot of work can be done without pointers at an introductory level.

When teaching new students you want them to have wins so they enjoy the learning experience. Writing my first "Hello World" in C was fun and easy, once I got the IDE set up correctly. Writing the code took a couple minutes. I labored for hours on the IDE. That was back in the DOS days and you had memory models to deal with because at one time someone thought computers would never need more than 64K of memory and Intel stuck to that limitation for a long time. To use more than 64K you had to segment memory and it got complex quickly. When I started using Microsoft VB it was a similar experience for different reasons. I better understood the concepts in the IDE but there were still a lot of decisions to make for my first application and event driven coding is much more complicated than sequential coding.

Now the CPUs are getting really advanced and I don't think it is practical for someone to have to learn assembly language as a first tool. Aseembler is more advanced and would be better learned after the student learns the hardware concepts in the computer so my happen in the second or third year of his or her education. I saw that Python was highly rated but I haven't learned it yet. I have heard great things about it though.

I learned C by reading books and writing code but I had to take a couple of courses to get a handle on C++. If I hadn't learned C first I might have been able to learn C++ on my own because I've learned all the other languages rather quickly, and on my own. Java is very much like C but safer. If you really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of the hardware you will not be able to avoid C/C++. C is not too hard to learn but can get a newbie into a lot of trouble, but only once you get into pointers and a lot of work can be done without pointers at an introductory level.

When teaching new students you want them to have wins so they enjoy the learning experience. Writing my first "Hello World" in C was fun and easy, once I got the IDE set up correctly. Writing the code took a couple minutes. I labored for hours on the IDE. That was back in the DOS days and you had memory models to deal with because at one time someone thought computers would never need more than 64K of memory and Intel stuck to that limitation for a long time. To use more than 64K you had to segment memory and it got complex quickly. When I started using Microsoft VB it was a similar experience for different reasons. I better understood the concepts in the IDE but there were still a lot of decisions to make for my first application and event driven coding is much more complicated than sequential coding.

Now the CPUs are getting really advanced and I don't think it is practical for someone to have to learn assembly language as a first tool. Aseembler is more advanced and would be better learned after the student learns the hardware concepts in the computer so my happen in the second or third year of his or her education. I saw that Python was highly rated but I haven't learned it yet. I have heard great things about it though.

Teno Cipri wrote:

 

That was back in the DOS days and you had memory models to deal with

That's one aspect of x86 that I'm happy to see fade into history. Trouble is that an EE is much more likely to be involved in the nitty gritty details of getting a newly designed system to boot the first time, so when that system is x86 they're much more likely to have to deal with real mode and all the old segmentation problems even if that's only as much as working out what the minimum requirements to get to protected mode are.