Programming

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Gee, what have you got against Cobol. Still gives me a thrill to lay hands on some cobol source. Stuff that'll outlive me sends shivers down my spine. Anyway, I wrote a million lines of the stuff - interleaved with assembler languages, Fortran, Basic, RPG, Pascal, C, C++, Java....

There is no such language as C/C++.

You mean you want to learn C and you want to learn C++. I have no idea why but there you go. I know C++ and I know C too, not that I ever wish to program in it given C++ is far superior.

C++ is a great language if only they would actually standardise more libraries and get it up to date with standards for various computer programming concepts such as threads, graphics and GUI, networks and internet, etc.

Drives me mad though that so many programmers get their hands on it and do a dreadful job, don't know how to refactor their code properly, don't use const when they should, misuse templates and inheritance. Then they bring me into the job, employ me for what a great C++ programmer I am and then don't let me clean up their mess because they're scared I'll break something.

By the way, I hope everyone here uses block-style bracing. K&R style is just too ugly and is for geeks. I hate it that Eclipse uses that style by default. And thus so many Java programmers are using it because some person who thought they were being clever decided to try to enforce it on everyone.

I just learned enough to realize I'd never make a good programmer...

Hack, phlegm....well, when I learned Cobol, the first half was on punched cards (no lie...dang State education budget..., and the 2nd half was on 3270 terminals (not emulation, but 'l-shaped' devices the size of a projector TV, and a screen the size of a laptop).

You compiled your source code. You sent it to the Operations folks (whether card packs or the send command). You waited for it to come back as a printout, on fanfold paper. You went through all the warnings, errors, and disasters, repunched cards, or redid lines on the screen. Lather, rinse, repeat...

If you got 2 runs on the card location in one evening, you were doing good. You could do some
more runs in a night on the 3270 terminals, but still, it was tedious.

First PC language I took (about the same time), was Basic, on an Apple II (pre-Mac). That I could do, later.

I use block style, K & R style gets on my nerves. My first was Pascal. My favourite is Java.

The Bad Old Days. Batch processing and JCL. Ugh. Dreadful. The only way to be productive on a batch processing environment was to multi-task the programmer and have have him/her work on a half dozen programs concurrently.

ruveyn

yeah...JCL..probably one reason linux command-line isn't quite as scary as it could be...

Some people have a knack for programming, I just consider programs tools, and as long as it works...

Python primarily

Started with C, then moved on to C++. Then Java. I was going to learn C# but I can't bring myself to learn something that was designed exclusively for M$ OS's. Especially considering how slow it tends to be by comparison to the languages I already now.

*actually*

C# was designed to be cross platform in the sense that Java is
Give mono a go if you ever take a stab at C#
http://mono-project.com/Main_Page

Interesting thought...

Of the four you mention, C# quite probably is capable of producing the FASTEST code. Also it is probably the quickest to write.

Mono was available from nearly the beginning, and even before that, sharpdevelop was the IDE to use, so MS essentially lost control of their "baby" from day one (two).

C#, by being a better designed language, can probably better C, purely because is becomes too involved to write highly efficient code in C. E.g. if you do not have a year or two available to write a really neat "Paint" program in C, you can knock out one pretty quickly in C#, as the libraries are extensive, and the "extra" code you might want to write can still be effectively pure "C" anyway.

So far as C++ is concerned, If you want to cope with the ambiguities of C plus the bolt-on verbosity/obfuscation of C++, go ahead. Again, development time will be long, and the shear time you will eat up, trying to figure out which parts you DON'T have to write from scratch will result in you coding sections inefficiently, purely because you never found anything better elsewhere.

And Java... well... stuck pretty much in its interpretive roots, I hardly see it as a competitor on speed. So far as portability goes, though, I guess it wins.

I learned some basic back in elementary school on a friends commodore. His mum loved buying him older computers since it was usually in pieces within the week. I don't remember any of it anymore, but we used to bring floppies to school and crash the system with stuff we wrote.

Now I'm planning on learning python. Apparently EVE online is written in python, and that game looks awesome. Could be fun. Though, to make a decent game I'm also going to have to learn C, or maybe C++. Need something to do pixelization with some form of speed.

The basic I learned in like, 95, 96ish, though we used pre-M$-ified basic, not crap visual. We were... a bit behind. Never liked Visual basic... kinda why I stopped programming for a while.

I first tried to study BASIC on the Dragon 64 back in 1985.

So do I. I've read up on C, and got the basic gist of all the theory behind variables, data types, statements, functions, arrays, strings memory management etc. etc. However, when it comes to reading source code of real programs, I can't understand a thing.


Other than OO and classes, what does C++ have to offer that C doesn't?


I've looked at Perl a bit too. I've heard that its good especially for Linux users. What are your favourite things about it?

C++ has to offer 4 things that C doesn't that make it easier to use:

- Automatic destructors
- Exceptions
- Polymorphism i.e. virtual functions.
- templates, in particular for collections

Automatic destructors take the place of garbage collection, that so many are fussy that C++ does not provide. Using shared pointers you also have automated garbage collection of objects you can pass around and have multiple references to.

C++ could do with a built-in foreach although you can always use a loop or BOOST_FOREACH. Lots of C++ programmers end up writing loads of functors or using weird bind statements to avoid writing a loop. I know because I did the same at one point, like loops were evil. Of course if you write loops properly, they often look cleaner than using std::for_each or std::transform

How exactly is C++ more obfuscated than Java or C#? Is it because you don't use dot operator for everything?

Actually, when using a native compiler you can get speeds around the same as C or C++

First language was visual basic when I was about 11 now I should be learning C++ more precicely win32API for cpp since I mostly know the basic language but..
..too lazy to bother atm and I got to focus on other stuff to stuy anyway.

EarlPurple wrote:
- Automatic destructors
At a memory/speed cost.
EarlPurple wrote:
- Exceptions
At a memory/speed cost.
EarlPurple wrote:
- Polymorphism i.e. virtual functions.
At a memory/speed cost.
EarlPurple wrote:
- templates, in particular for collections
At a memory/speed cost.

No... quite the reverse. They require garbage collection. They employ whichever form of GC happens to be pretty much forced on you. They are a nice "quick fix" that avoids having to do any serious thinking about memory usage. They are fine for general, low volume allocation/deallocation. They encourage a lazy approach to memory usage, which is fine, if that is not an importation consideration - which is true in most cases.