[plug] Programming Languages

[Christian]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 11:35:05AM +0800, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > distribution is the best or even which editor? (Debian and vim, btw...)
> You're doing well so far. :)

Yeah, I thought so too. :P

> > 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 usually, but not always, exposure to other languages/paradigms. Some
> of the most beautiful code I have seen has been written in C - it allows
> an elegant simplicity with which the programmer can do anything he or she
> sees fit without constraint, and if the programmer is good at what they
> do, the results reflect that almost perfectly. Chances are though, that
> they learnt those ways of thinking and abstracting from use of some
> bondage+discipline language forcing them to think that way in the past.

I know what you mean but sometimes C makes you jump through hoops to do
things which *should* be straightforward.  This is one of the things I
like about Perl -- it allows me to do exactly what I want in a number of
simple and highly logical steps.

> OTOH, if you learn Perl too early you will probably never become a _good_
> programmer. Ditto Visual Basic. I don't know if it's a good idea to use
> Perl too extensively until such time as you are broadly enough experienced
> to understand what is wrong with it. That said, it is probably the world's
> most useful scripting language as long as you don't have the intention of
> learning good coding practices with it.

*nod*  Completely agree.

 
> > The disadvantages of Perl (IMHO) are <...> 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.
> Only for a beginner? What are your rates for maintaining Perl code?

Heh.  I can read my own Perl code with extreme ease.  While C code can
look extremely elegant, IMHO nothing compares to a well-written bit of
Perl.  Perl allows you to do exactly what you want using extremely nice
syntactic structures and the resulting code is quite beautiful.  The
major problem is that there are also a bunch of extremely ugly syntactic
structures for doing the exact same thing so, like you say, if you're a
good programmer and have experience with something like C then the Perl
code you write is also probably going to be quite good.  But if you like
writing messy code (which you can do under pretty much any language)
then Perl is a disaster waiting to happen.

 
> > Syntactically it's also quite a bit simpler than Perl too.
> My mind is boggling trying to think of a language of which this is false. 

True... there are plenty of languages which syntactically are much more
obscure but probably none that are quite as complex.

> > <prepares to pass worm can onto next person>
> <shaking the can> "It's ready, who wants it now?"

Ugg, pass it back the other way, I've had enough of it... :P