| ??? 10/28/08 14:04 Read: times |
#159412 - commercial? Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
When doing commercial jobs, you normally don't have a choice - the customer (or the company you work for) normally have requirements about what language to use. I am programming for food for some 15 years now and this job is for the first time I could not decide - just because I jumped into an already established pool of code (even then I was able to choose tools of my own preference - I am wrapping C into a "meta-language" derived from WEB and XML). My customer/employer never did care about the language, it was the product what was important. What I am trying to say is, that there are many, many different kinds of programming, even "commercial" (i.e. paying the bills). One size does not fit all. Per Westermark said:
If we note the huge amount of operating systems and other important applications that has been developed in C or C++, it should be quite obvious that the two langauages can not be as bad as some people manages to decide based on a quick peek. A couple of years ago, there was some billion people living in what was commonly called communism. Would you say it could not be THAT bad? There were hundreds of millions of Spice Girls fans a couple of years ago. Does this mean that it was some really GOOD music? Per Westermark said:
You don't decide to use C for an operating system because your main goal is to make it hard for beginners to be able to read the source... No. You chose it because you can steal out parts of other OS. Meantime, you can do your best to make it hard for beginners to be able to read the source - just to feel cool. (I exaggerate here deliberately - a flamewar is no fun without exaggeration). Per Westermark said:
I can't read russian. As a matter of fact, it takes me quite some time just to dechipher the cyrillic characters. But that does not seem to affect a native russian. I can read russian fluently, and I speak it fairly well. After all, it is a slavic language, quite similar to Slovak in many respects, and it was compulsory in our schools in a similar way as English is in yours. However, it means for me a great effort to read the characters and I feel physically exhausted after having read a short novel. It is even more complicated to write in it, either by hand, or to type. English is not a slavic language, and shares little in grammar and vocabulary with my native language(s). Yet I was able to manage this crumbled form in a quite a few years of school, and have no problem whatsoever to read or write on a daily basis. Yes, the alphabet DOES matter. Per Westermark said:
The main thing is that most things are more or less hard, but becomes easier with experience. The main thing is, that the BASICS are much firmer laid down with Pascal, and you can manage the first steps with much less experience. And, as I said already, it is much easier to manage it with Pascal when you don't program on a daily basis - simply because you don't need to keep that translation table from "&&" to "AND, but beware, boolean-ish" in your head. Call that experience, if you want. Oh yes, it is not that sexy than C. JW |
