[Sussex] Linux IDE's

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 20:05 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> I wasn't suggesting Perl is any better than C++ -- I prefer C++ to
> anything.  My point with reference to Perl was that it can be just as
> obfuscated or "harder" (if not as hard) to learn as C++ -- it seemed
> silly to single out C++ in this way.

I agree about the obfustication.  The only reason I "singled out" C++ is
that Matt was talking specifically about C++.  

> Interesting.  Technically (although not true in my case) I would
> probably say my first language was Java.  Is this anymore succinct than
> C++?  Unbdoubtedly it has just the same pitfalls as C++ has.  But I
> managed it, and it wasn't too bad.

Java is much closer to C#.  It looks a little like C++, sharing a
C-style syntax, but really it's not that close in actual usage.  

You could probably learn some basic C++ is _less_ time that Java because
Java relies so much on it's environment (the toolset and packages really
define the language in Java's case).  However if you sat down with a
Java book and learned "Java" you could probably walk into a company and
do _some_ (but by no means all) of what they asked you to do.  This is
true of many languages, particularly those that are not "standards" and
are tightly integrated with their toolset.  I'm thinking here of the
likes of Java, the .Net languages, the old Visual Basic, Visual C++,
Visual FoxPro, Borland Delphi/Kylix, all manner of 4GL's, etc, etc..

The difference with C++ is that you could learn a lot, a large books
worth and then look at some real code and not understand a word.  Not
because the code was obfusticated but because it was written in a very
different style.  

On top of that the same syntax can mean very different things in
different styles of C++ programming.  One my favourtie quotes about C++
is:

"I saw `cout' being shifted "Hello world" times to the left and stopped
right there." 
   -- Steve Gonedes

> As a "first" language, conceptually one could start off with anything
> they like, as (presumably) they probably won't know much different.  If,
> on the other hand, they have used a programming language before, then
> all well the better.  Every language has their idioms, I have yet to
> find one which is based solely upon them.

Agreed, but from a sanity point of view learning Python / C# / Java /
Smalltalk / Scheme / a.n.other is likely to be more rewarding to the
novice than C++, not least because they all deal with some of the more
complex issues (like memory management) for you.

How many people give up on their first segfault?

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