About programing, a general question

[Parshwa Murdia]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 4:24 PM, <J.Witvliet at 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
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