On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 1:04 PM, David Kaiser <dkai...@cdk.com> wrote:
> There are more people using each of COBOL, Logo, Ada, and Fortran than > there are using Smalltalk. Says something about practicality and > suitability for a purpose. Although it begs the question that if COBOL > is suited for business, and Fortran for science, what was Logo > well-suited for? :) (I think LOGO is similar to and was an influence > on Smalltalk) > Another possibility: COBOL and Fortran are important only because of libraries and massive amounts of legacy code based on them. They are really pretty abysmal languages for anything by modern standards, but they are still important for practical reasons. As a programmer you learn very quickly that massive cleanups and rewrites are a great way to derail a project or functioning system. It's usually better to use or fix what you've got. > > I also think that if you are truly a good professional C programmer, you > can more easily adapt to other languages. It's not also so in reverse, > we've tried to take people that were good at Visual Basic or other > interpreted languages and have them learn C, and it usually doesn't > work so well. Perhaps it has to do with which language you learn first? > My take is that it depends on the language. Being a good C programmer requires understanding of lower level concepts and that prepares you for programming challenges in general (assembly language is an even better way to learn this... or examining code generated by a C compiler). Also many languages base their syntax on C so that gives you a little head start (and maybe a false sense of security... JavaScript may look like C but C it ain't). But I would say that C is very poor preparation for functional and declarative languages like Scheme and XSLT, respectively. You might actually be better off in these languages learning them before C. My first language was Microsoft Extended Color BASIC imprinted at a tender age. I'm not sure how badly that screwed me up initially, but Recovery Is Possible. -- John. _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
