On 19/12/2013 04:29, rusi wrote:
On Thursday, December 19, 2013 6:19:04 AM UTC+5:30, Rhodri James wrote:
On Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:51:44 -0000, Wolfgang Keller wrote:
The only issue for me was to figure out how to do in C what I already
knew in Pascal. And I had to waste a *lot* more time and mental effort
to mess with that language than it took for me to learn *both* the
basics of programming per se *and* Pascal in the first class at my home
university.
It's sounds like you made, and are carrying on making, one of the classic
mistakes of software engineering: you're trying to write one language in
the style of another. It is possible to write C code as if it were
Pascal, but it's a painful process and it won't be pretty. It's far
better to use a language as it is rather than as you want it to be.
Yes but the reverse is also true: Sometimes the best code in language
L is first conceptualized in design-language D and then 'coded' into
L.
When we were students D was called 'flow-charts'
Gone out of fashion today and replaced by UML.
Now I expect the majority on this list to not care for UML.
However the idea of a separate design language is not negated by the fact
that UML is overkill and silly.
eg Saw this (on the Erlang mailing list)
In some Australian university (in the 90s) 2 sems of Cobol was
replaced by 1 sem Scheme + 1 sem Cobol. Students learnt more Cobol in
the second arrangement than in the first. [Note: 'More Cobol' not 'More
Programming']
Now if you were to ask those *students* I would expect similar
emotions towards Cobol as Wolfgang is expressing towards C.
That is however a separate issue :D
If C is such a crap language, what does it says for the thousands of
languages that never got anywhere? Or did C simply have a far larger
sales and marketing budget? :)
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
