[Gllug] OT(ish): Advice

[rich at annexia.org]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 01:30:54PM +0000, Richard Hillesley wrote:
> and here's betting that VB.net 2 and c# 2 will be totally new languages too
> (It has taken at least 7 iterations to get to where "VB should have been at 
> the start" - maybe VB should have been C++ from the start, and C# should have
> been Java,  and maybe  then interoperability would not be an issue. 

Indeed, and why would anyone want to commit to a language which
has only a single (real) implementation, which is heavily proprietary
and unlikely to be standardised or cloned? You could find all those skills are
wasted at the whim of the controlling company. (This argument applies
to Java too). Note that an implementation of C# + the useful APIs
implies an implementation of the whole of Win32 (see this posting
from Miguel d'Icanza: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=47421&cid=4852021 )
And C# seems to be Java with some of the problems of that language
fixed - ie. big deal.

Learn C and C++ first. There are a broad range of free and commercial
compilers, and the languages are really standardised. Learning C will
help you get pointers/assembly straight. Learning C++ will tell you
what not to do when designing a language. From there you can look at
OCaML or Haskell, Perl, Smalltalk, etc. etc.

(Sorry, felt like a rant :-)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj

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