[wellylug] Programming Question

[Donald Gordon]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 08:04:00 +1300 Grant McLean <grant at mclean.net.nz> wrote:

> Seriously, for the stage you're at, I think Perl would be an excellent 
> choice of language.  Unlike 'C', you don't have to bother with the 
> compilation phase - that's done for you when you run the program.  You 
> also don't have to worry about allocating and freeing memory which is 
> probably the biggest pain in C.

If the stage is "beginning programming", Perl, while it can be a very
useful language, is probably a bad idea, as it teaches bad habits.
Something with static typing (and less idiosyncratic syntax) would be a
better choice.

Of course, if you don't see yourself writing anything more than simple
little programs to automate various tasks, it will probably do.  But if
you aspire to greater things, starting with a more restrictive language
(Java?) that teaches less bad habits is probably a good idea.

> Far too much open source software is written in C or C++ simply because 
> of silly biases against 'scripting' languages.

Far too much open source software is written in PHP because the authors
don't know any better.  Far too much open source software uses MySQL
despite it being awful.  Far too much open source software uses <product
that I don't like> because <reason>.

The problem isn't "scripting languages" in general: it's features they
tend to exhibit (such as Perl's type system) that causes some people to
judge them unsuitable for some tasks.

> I'm not suggesting there's no place for C.  But restricting its use to 
> low-level and performance critical routines, then tying them together 
> with a higher level language can offer huge benefits in productivity, 
> reliability and security.

Modern C++ takes care of at least some of those issues, and others are
more related to the programmer's skill level than the programming
language; bad programmers can write crap in any language, given the
chance (except prehaps Haskell :-).  And some of us *like* templates :-)

donald