Fun Stuff > CLIKC
The Programming Thread.
elcapitan:
Actually, Mike makes a very good point.
Go back to basics. Make sure you understand the difference between an IDE and a language. Make sure you understand how the language handles objects, types, functions, methods, etc.
Oh. If you want to learn an interesting language, learn ADA.
Scytale:
I had to write a essay type thing on type safety and exception handling in ADA for uni, mainly about is roll in the Ariane 5 incident. Kiind of turned me off the language
Our lecturer was a Bertrand Meyer Fan boy and pretty much gave out full marks if you mentioned the problem could have been prevented by using DBC methodology like invariants and pre and post conditions.
The big thing I learnt after entering the workforce is the big difference between "accademic" programming langauges like Eiffel and ADA and "real world" languages. At least for engineering type work, I used to do a bit of simulation process modelling stuff in my first position. C and C++ are the absolute kings in this area, with Java gaining a fair bit of traction as well. Oh and I've never met anyone who uses formal proofs to varify the correctness of their code. At uni they kept cramming things like loop invariants down our throats, when realy they would have been much better teachnig us how to use a debugger properly...
I'd say C is probably the best langauge you can ever learn, I taught it to myself using the O'Reilly C book. Once you wrap you're head around C you become a much better programmer at least in my experience. It is also an extremely powerfull language, if you can get the hang of pointers and memory allocation it becomes very easy to start implementing you're own optimised data structures and things like that and that leads to fast code. If you need to program anything remotely low level or anything that interfaces with something at a low level (like threading or sockets), you'll need some C knowledge.
If you want to learn an accademic language go with something like LISP or Haskell. I really wish I had learnt a functional programming language...
nihilist:
C drives me batshit crazy because of the lack of ease of finding a library and an API for it. That's where Java/J2EE and .NET come in handy; they whole class library that comes along for the ride.
Catfish_Man:
That's actually basically why I like Objective-C/Cocoa. It gives you the dynamic-OO + shiny API stuff for most tasks, but the language is a strict superset of C, so you can still use the huge assortment of odd special purpose bits of code that have accumulated for C (as well as dropping into pure C for performance reasons when needed).
Rubby:
--- Quote from: Scytale on 27 Oct 2006, 19:55 ---Oh and I've never met anyone who uses formal proofs to varify the correctness of their code. At uni they kept cramming things like loop invariants down our throats, when realy they would have been much better teachnig us how to use a debugger properly...
--- End quote ---
This is good to hear. I'm so sick of getting C's (pun?) because I didn't state all my function invariants. Of course, in the real world I wont be getting graded on assignments but it's nice to know I wont be getting my ass kicked for leaving out the occasional invariant or condition documentation.
Thread starter. It seems like you need to step away from Visual Studio for a little while. Something I found good was to write a few small programs in notepad (or something like nano on a Unix system). That way you're focusing on writing good clean code because you know debugging is gonna be a hellbitch if it's not nice code.
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