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- Path: news.ccs.queensu.ca!news
- From: Wintermute <3mal5@qlink.queensu.ca>
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: Help!!! Sort of?!?!?!?
- Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 07:16:32 -0500
- Organization: System Infinity
- Message-ID: <3163BDA0.6839@qlink.queensu.ca>
- References: <maveryck.8.00683ACB@escape.ca>
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-
- Tony Bonomo wrote:
- > Which language is the best all around!?!? I know that's a one-sided question
- > and obviously quite subject to bias, (especially in this group ;) but I have
- > heard so many different stories from so many different people, and I happen to
- > love C++ in the first place, for too many reasons to list here, so I want some
- > opinions... Marketability is great, from what I hear, portability is easy, if the
- > code is written properly, it is efficient, simple enough to learn (for an
- > experienced coder), and ... Are these right? Is that all?
-
- It all depends on what you are doing, of course. C++ is so popular nowadays, that it
- seems to be the language to learn. But then again, most of the world's running code is
- written in COBOL (I pray to God I never have to use any...). C and Pascal, are still
- around, and BASIC is making a comeback with the simplicity of its visual tools. Turing
- is a more modern Pascal that has the advantage of being precisely mathematically
- defined; it has modern constructs such as modules and fork statements defined in the
- language (as opposed to the preprocessor like in C/++).
-
- If you want a pure object-oriented language, you may have to go beyond C++ to
- SmallTalk. If you are doing artificial intelligence work, you will probably need a
- higher level language like Lisp or Prolog (a logic language). Or maybe a functional
- language like Miranda or Nial (an array-based language).
-
- If you've only ever seen C or Pascal before, these languages will throw you.
- Functional language programming is different from logic programming is different from
- plain old imperative (procedural) programming. You don't so much as specify how to do
- something as what to do. It would be valuable to at least acquire an understanding of
- those sorts of concepts (ie, one functional language and one logic language, etc) if
- you may be doing anything beyond simple C++ coding.
-
- Myself, I pretty much stick to C++ for all of my needs. But then, using a C++ compiler
- doesn't mean you are writing well-designed, object-oriented C++ code. Learn some
- software engineering techniques to improve your coding, with whatever language you are
- using. Some of the higher level languages offer handy facilities such as garbage
- collection and strong typing. Or, like Nial, they are untyped (everything is a nested
- array). It would depend on what I was trying to do: if I was writing a GUI, I'd use
- C++... if I was programming a robot, I'd use Nial or Lisp or something like that.
-
- Good luck!
-
- --
- Wintermute <3mal5@qlink.queensu.ca> <http://qlink.queensu.ca/~3mal5/>
-
- "If I really knew how to write, I could write something that someone
- could read and it would kill them." - william s. burroughs
-