[plug] Programming Languages

[Christian]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 10:37:03AM +1000, Clint Carlson wrote:
> As a new linux user I have been inspired to re-try my hand at programming,
> just for fun. The last experience I had was with pascal all so many years
> ago (which i was a bit of a guru at I dont mind saying :P)
> 
> Now I am looking for a language/builder that is simple to use but has good
> functionality. I was wondering if any of you could lead me in the right
> direction....As I said I will be using this just for personal.small uses,
> now for serious programming.....

<takes open can of worms from Clint>

My god, what a question.  Are you sure you don't want to know which
distribution is the best or even which editor? (Debian and vim, btw...)

Ok, well... there are probably a million and one opinions for this but
here's mine.  If you want to do serious programming (or at least pretend
to) then C is the way to go.  You can probably pick it up from your
Pascal background without too much difficulty but being a good C
programmer takes a bit of practice and you can expect to get the message
"Segmentation fault" quite often... ;-)

If you want a fun language that's easy to use and is very flexible (plus
has HEAPS of really easy to use libraries to do practically anything)
then Perl is the way to go.  It's probably a bit further away from
Pascal than C in terms of syntax but it's much more forgiving and if you
pick up a decent book (e.g., "Learning Perl") then you'll be up and
running in no time.  The disadvantages of Perl (IMHO) are that it's
slower than C (usually not a big issue) and it's syntax has a multitude
of forms ("There's more than one way to do it!") which can get quite
confusing at times, especially for a beginner.

If you like object oriented things, or just want to see what all the
fuss is about, then Python is probably the way to go.  It's apparently
very easy to learn, is very powerful and also lots of fun.
Syntactically it's also quite a bit simpler than Perl too.

<prepares to pass worm can onto next person>

Regards,

Christian.