On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 4:24 PM, <J.Witvliet(a)mindef.nl> wrote:
To avoid religious wars....
The "best" programming language, is the one you feel most comfortable with,
obviously.
Though i was lucky enough to avoid basic, i grew up with assembly, C, plm,
Pascal, fortran, cobol, chill, all sorts of shell's, perl.
In the very old days, if you needed to sqeeze any cycle out of the cpu, you
were stuck with assembly.
Some years later, the code produced by C-compilers has been getting that
good that even modest time-critical routines for accessing hardware were
do-able.
Biggest advantage was that code became hw-independant.
Each language has/had its own advantages/drawbacks. At one point in time i
"discovered" the swiss-army-knife of languages: perl. Since then nomore sh
korn,bourne, c-shell, awk or grep anymore. Though it looks like Python is
replacing perl currently.
First rush of hobby-level programmers was getting asap "some results",
quality was not relevant.
Specially with basic it is possible to produce spagetty-code. (though you
can actually produce unreadable code with any language)
When i left university, they were teaching Pascal at first-years students.
It encourage you to think about data-structures and so on.
Thoughy i understand that in this day-and-age, it has been replaced with
C++ and Java.
So for really learning coding, i would suggest starting with C, and later
on switch to C++ / java.
For doing (semi-) production, it's anothert game: see my first line, but it
all boils down to the same rules.
- get to know the hardware-environment you are dealing with (extensive
playing, no production code)
- make a top-level design (what are the requirements)
- make a detailed design (how are you going to do it)
- do not re-invent the wheel (there are zillions of libraries: use them)
- work modular
- User interface? Think about multi-language
- define entry/exit conditions
- define where you check conditions
- timing or race-conditions?
- use a versioning system
- ....
So actually the programming language is the least of your concern.
Coding style and practices is all. And stick to it.
hw
You say correctly, 'The "best" programming language, is the one you feel
most comfortable with, obviously.' As I am new and starting just, so I guess
(with all the suggestions I get and from searching too) that either Python
or C language would be a good start. Pascal is now less used. However, I
agree with you that programing principles remain the same for any language,
indeed.
--
Regards,
Parshwa Murdia