Minimal skills

[Donald Wilde]

On 6/5/20, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 08:05:33 -0400, Robert Huff wrote:
>>
>> Kurt Hackenberg writes:
>>
>> >  I guess you could start with C, and maybe add C++ later. That's if
>> >  you want to learn to program, which is a big project. There's also
>> >  an argument that a beginning programmer should learn some newer
>> >  language.
>>
>> 	I am now accepting rhetorical nominations for a useful
>> programming language better suited for teaching a beginning programmer
>> of at least average intelligence.  At the moment the only other
>> candidate is Pascal, <sarcasm>beloved on account of its vast code
>> base</sarcasm>.

<flame_war!>
FWIW, Java has become a really bad choice. Not only is Oracle
requiring licenses for commercial development, Java8 is very, very
majorly different than Java7.

Architect of a project I was on (the same one I referenced earlier):
   "We should use Java. There are lots of Java programmers out there!"
Me: "There are lots of Java programmers out there because you _need_
lots of them to get anything done and the stack is always breaking!"

For a first-language choice, I like Ruby because it is so elegant and
it is fully OO.

That said, the commercial world in the US does not agree with me and
they want everybody to use Python(3), which, while fully supported by
amazing libraries (many of which find their way to Ruby very quickly),
is a very ugly SOB that to me is Perl5's much uglier cousin.

I have come back to C++ as my language of choice for professional code
crafting. It is a terrible first language to learn OOP, but it is fast
and sufficiently obfuscateable (pImpl, etc.) that you can protect your
source as a trade secret rather than needing to expose it all with a
patent. I am beginning to explore the LLVM-based CLANG as a C++
variant because it stands a chance if becoming the go-to Grail of
"write once, run everywhere" although system and GUI interface
libraries still need to be refined further for that to be completely
the case.

> Speaking from my own terrible experience, Pascal is a
> collection of things you need to unlearn when you start
> understanding what _really_ happens. :-)
>

Oh, I thought that was ada...

</flame_war!> :D
-- 
Don Wilde
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