About programing, a general question

Doug dmcgarrett at optonline.net
Fri Dec 17 05:08:25 UTC 2010


On 12/16/2010 12:14 PM, Michael Moum wrote:
> I recommend python because it's easy to learn and has a consistent 
> syntax. The main thing in learning to program is to understand the 
> concepts, so you want a language where the syntax doesn't complicate 
> things, and python is perfect for that. Perl's syntax is horrible - 
> stay away.
>
> Mike
>
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com 
> <mailto:clanlaw at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 16 December 2010 16:59, Parshwa Murdia <ubuntu.bkn at gmail.com
>     <mailto:ubuntu.bkn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> /snip/

I'm going to have to look into Python.  Years ago, before you could buy 
or get for free a whole batch of scientifically-related
software, folks in engineering and some other disciplines wrote their 
own code to solve cumbersome, repetitive calculations.
Those who were in school a bit later than I studied Fortran, and used 
that.  It's complicated, and I never learned any of it.
Most of us, in those ancient days--when your mainframe was a 
half-continent away and connected to your model 35 Teletype
machine by an acoustic modem, used BASIC.  This was not a terrible 
language, no matter what anyone says.  It suffered mainly from a lack of 
the "case" statement.  In 1983, I went on to learn Pascal--the kind 
without graphics--and found it quite useful to do the same
sort of work.  It suffered from a difficulty of writing control code; 
that's where C and C++ came in.  I would think that for
general purpose use nowadays (not knowing Python) that C and its 
offspring would be the most widely accepted language for
doing almost anything.  It's not as clear-cut as Pascal, which is fairly 
rigidly constrained--an advantage, in my opinion--but
it's the language that most professional code seems to be written in, 
from control of CPUs and microprocessors, to Windows
and Linux and the other Unixes. Also, if you ever desire to progress to 
a work situation that requires coding in a common language,
C and/or C++ would almost surely be it.

One of the responders mentioned syntax:  I just took a course in Bash 
programming, one of the most commonly used  languages
of the Unix/Linux operating systems, and the syntax of that is also 
pretty rough.  If you don't need it, then don't do it.  (If you do
need it, you will have to just put up with it. (Bash, the "Bourne Again 
Shell" is an outgrowth of the Bourne Shell, from earlier
Unix days; the other two common ones are the C Shell and the Korn Shell.)

--doug--

Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides. --A. M. Greeley

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