[Sussex] Linux IDE's

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 17:56 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> Oh _please_ that's crap.  I could say the exact same thing about Perl,
> for instance.

I'm sorry?

It's not crap - the way C++ is used in the real world varies massively
from company to company and from developer to developer and the scope
for variation is far greater than with Perl, despite that illustrious
languages motto. 

Now I'm no fan of perl, I think it's a good idea but a bad
implementation (I'd say the same of python, which in some key regards is
much worse and in other much better).  The whole point of perl is to
allow people some of the flexibility of  languages like C and C++
without all the tedious mucking about, as Larry Wall said:

"What is the sound of perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people
have stopped banging their heads against?"

Sure, perl can be written in an unreadable manner and "there's more than
one way to do it" (and many, many libraries), but C++ is just
conceptually much, much larger.  Even if you stick to the standard (and
avoid the sheer number of libraries and toolkits that 20 years at the
top of the pile has produced) it encompasses more than one style of
functional programming, object orientated programming, and generic
programming (and allows for all manner of crocky mixtures thereof).

Even ignoring that my original point was that a lot of books will teach
you to program in a very simple OO style and ignore STL (which is part
of the standard) and stream creation (as opposed to utilisation).  They
do this because it's easy to understand, but the reality is that many,
many experienced C++ programmers would look on the work of someone who
has learned from such a book as being _bad_, old-fashioned and crocky.  

None of this is to say "Do not learn C++", but "Do not learn C++ unless
you have to", which probably should have the additional caveat "or
unless you really want to".  Certainly I wouldn't recommend C++ as your
first programming experience.

-- 
Geoffrey Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation