RE: Good Starter Language? (was Re: REALBasic and OpenAL)
I liked Pascal but what do you do with it?
Measure pressure... What the #$@% do you think you do with it!?! Delphi 2005 kicks major ass. Nuff said.
Perl seems to be very easy to learn and yet extremely powerful and can get very complex. But it has just never really taken off as a mainstream language. However, I've found a few applications that I would't write in anything else.
Perl? Might as well be writing code in Mandarin Chinese. The multitude of symbols and one character keywords sacrifices legibility for less typing. Perl is not for the faint of heart or the beginner. I for one hate having to keep a whole library of O'Reilly books by my side while I code. A good language should be intuitive and not require a ton of syntax memorization. Python is better, but not by much.
I don't really like Java but it's all the rage today. And how many times have we all heard that the new language was going to replace all the other languages? Sure, it's good for a lot of things but I really don't think I'd recommend it as a beginner language any more that I'd make 6-year-olds use a calculator to learn 1+1=2.
I have no use for Java.
For a language that is good and introduces you to a lot of topics and is easy to start learning and can get very complex later as you grow you really can't beat C or C++.
C/C++/C# can get a little involved for the beginner. However, it has proven the test of time, and I have to admit I broke my cherry with C. ;-)
BASIC, in all of it's forms, I've found really stinks IMHO.
agreed.
On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 15:09 -0600, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
I liked Pascal but what do you do with it?
Measure pressure... What the #$@% do you think you do with it!?!
Delphi 2005 kicks major ass. Nuff said.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to characterize this as Object Pascal?
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:09:46 -0600 "Jeremy Fowler" <JFowler@westrope.com> wrote:
Perl? Might as well be writing code in Mandarin Chinese. The multitude of symbols and one character keywords sacrifices legibility for less typing. Perl is not for the faint of heart or the beginner. I for one hate having to keep a whole library of O'Reilly books by my side while I code. A good language should be intuitive and not require a ton of syntax memorization. Python is better, but not by much.
You do know that you can write easily readable Perl don't you? Just because those weird variables like $_, $', $*, $/, etc exist doesn't mean you have to use them. In fact they already have built in "english" equivalents. I've always seen Perl's ability to do this much like Unix. It gives you enough rope to hang yourself with, it's your choice whether or not to use that rope. ;) Anyone who uses the shortcuts does so knowing they are sacrificing readability and maintainability. This, as I've said one more occasions than most people probably want to hear, is the fault of the programmer not the language. While you can write: open(IN, $ARGV[0]); while(<IN>) { chomp; $_ =~ s/A/B/oig; print; print "\n"; } close; You can also write: my $filename = $ARGV[0]; open(IN, $filename) or die "Cannot open input file '$filename': $!\n"; while( my $line = <IN> ) { chomp($line); $line =~ s/A/B/oig; # Replace all As with Bs print "$line\n"; } close(IN); --------------------------------- Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org> http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------
participants (3)
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Frank Wiles -
Jason Clinton -
Jeremy Fowler