[Fsf-india] Re: Fwd: Free Software for Education (willbe: Language Wars)

Gopal.V gopalv82@yahoo.com
Wed, 12 Dec 2001 19:19:37 +0530


Hi,
>> These interpreted languages comes with a rich set of libraries which can 
>> be used right away, which makes things easier..
 ``A language that doesn't have everything is easier to program 
   than in some that do''
                                         -- Dennis Ritchie

	From all I've seen of programming (which is not much), I found out
very quickly there is no such thing as a killer programming language.

	My first language was C and it affected the way I program quite a bit.
But as someone (sic) has said ``A language that doesn't affect the way you
think is not worth learning at all''. I have tried a bit of assembly , Java, 
C++, script-fu (scheme), Perl, Php and Python. In the end I find that 
``programming'' and ``coding'' are two things indeed. This is the idea to
be inculcated in programmers. Don't get tied to your pet language.

	And as far as teaching languages is concerned, C is an excellent start
where you get to learn stuff like pointers without any so called abstraction.
Scheme and Python are great stuff for starting off, but nothing like C in
the long run. (try telling a python guy to put ; on each line !).

	After having said so much in favor of C, let me also qoute a Scheme
hacker's signature.

	`` I intend to bring to light this global conspiracy by Dennis Ritchie
		aided by Bjarne Stroustrup, Larry Wall and Bill Joy''

ie you can never hope to convert a scheme guy to *mainstream* programming.
   but C guys need to be more flexible due to C's blatant lack of portability.  
   
Gopal.V
-- 
 The difference between insanity and genius is only measured by success
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