On Monday, 9 May 2016 at 19:09:35 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:
[snip]
Let me give you a sense of the sorts of issues I'm thinking of.
Here is a C sample from ProgrammingSimplified.com. It finds the
frequency of characters in a string:
int main()
{
char string[100];
int c = 0, count[26] = {0};
printf("Enter a string\n");
gets(string);
while (string[c] != '\0')
{
/** Considering characters from 'a' to 'z' only
and ignoring others */
if (string[c] >= 'a' && string[c] <= 'z')
count[string[c]-'a']++;
c++;
}
for (c = 0; c < 26; c++)
{
/** Printing only those characters
whose count is at least 1 */
if (count[c] != 0)
printf("%c occurs %d times in the entered
string.\n",c+'a',count[c]);
}
return 0;
}
[snap]
I went to www.programmingsimplified.com/c-program-examples and
found that this was example 48 out of 59. The examples start with:
- Hello world
- Print Integer
- Addition
- Odd or Even
- Add, subtract, multiply and divide
- Check vowel
- Leap year
- Add digits
- [...]
and so on, with increasing complexity.
Nobody starts with examples like the one above. More likely with
number 1 in their list:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
return 0;
}
Not so difficult to understand.
A Python version similar to the example you gave above looks like
this [1]:
def char_frequency(str1):
dict = {}
for n in str1:
keys = dict.keys()
if n in keys:
dict[n] += 1
else:
dict[n] = 1
return dict
print(char_frequency('google.com'))
Throw this at the uninitiated newbie and s/he will have similar
difficulties in understanding it at first sight. You're talking
about showing someone who's beginning how to learn guitar charts
from Paco de Lucía's masterpieces.
It's not the syntax, it's being used to thinking in a certain
way, and this takes time and practice (like an instrument). Once
you've reached a certain level you can parse things at sight.
More important than syntax, in my opinion, are language features,
i.e. what can be expressed in and with a language. If you look at
both of the examples above, they tackle the same problem from a
slightly different angle. But it's still the same underlying
logic. That's why it is not hard for programmers to edit/write
code in languages they don't know well. They know _what_ to do,
and just look at _how_ they can best do it in a given language.
And this is where D kicks in. D and other languages explore how
abstract concepts and problems can best be solved, what tools
should be available etc. If anything, you should concentrate on
matching the world to the machine using programming languages,
instead of focusing on trivial syntax features. It's like
discussing whether it's important to write the expression "in
spite" as one word or two, while what counts is its function:
Inspite of the bad weather, we could get to the conference in
time.
It's the same as
In spite of the bad weather, we could get to the conference in
time.
The important thing is that we have the concept of "in spite",
and we can add more concepts and more ways of expressing them.
Syntax is trivial. Syntax is a mere convention that can be
learned and, what is more, is confined to a closed domain that
rarely interferes with other "realities".
[1]
http://www.w3resource.com/python-exercises/python-data-type-exercise-7.php
