--On Sunday, September 21, 2003 21:28 -0400 Paul Kraus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Perl was pretty much my first language. Not counting Business Basic and same old Pascal from high school. The more I learn the more I see that perl can handle just about anything I want to do. How do you go about deciding if you should use another tool such as C++ over perl? I am thinking about learning another language and trying to decide what language would be best to learn. To expand my skill set. Suggestions, Ideas, Book Recommendations?
It would really depend on why you want another language. Each is good at some things. C/C++ (I learned them as one, so that is how I think of them) is good for optimized code (either for size or speed). Higher level languages are good for quick development and mockups.
Also, what platform you plan to be using could make some difference: Windows is pushing C#, Macintosh Objective-C, and Unix/Linux traditionally uses bare C, so if you wanted to develop for a particular platform you might choose to learn the language that has the best tools for it.
Looking over what I'm writing, I'm starting to think that if you don't know it learning C would probably be a good idea, for the simple reason that it seems to be a baseline language at the moment, with lots of other languages being derivatives of it.
At the moment, as a new learner, I would say only times when I would want to use C over Perl would be when I really need speed. I do like to play in REALBasic (a Visual Basic clone for Mac), just for the speed in which I can create a full featured GUI app. (Though I haven't had a chance to tackle that in Perl yet.)
On the other hand, if the reason you want to learn a new language is to learn about programming, then I would suggest learning some weird language that has as little to do with the rest as possible. (Or take some idea to the extreme.) Something like Forth, Smalltalk, Fortran, or LISP could be a good way to learn to think about programming differently. (Heck, you could try Brainfuck, Befunge, or INTERCAL if you are *really* ambitious.)
Or you could go the 'web developer' route and learn things like PHP or ASP, which you could really do in completely in Perl, but occasionally are useful on their own...
Ok, I'm rambling at this point. Time to stop.
Daniel T. Staal
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