I'd like to get some perspectives from anyone who wants to put one forward in regards to programming languages.


I've looked into Delphi a LONG time ago, but I never progressed far enough to do anything with it. I did some basic console C apps at the university a long time ago as well, but I'm interested in more power.

Some of the aspects I'd like to hear about are:

Ease of use
Learning curve
Free compilers/tools available (I'm not looking to fork out $$ for MS compiler if there's a free one)
Learning resources
Powerful

Just out for some opinions.

Thanks,
Ahk

Ahk, C++ all the way.

Ease of use: Well, if it is easy it generally has faults elsewhere but C++ to me is easy enough.
Learning curve: You know C there wouldn't be a very steep one if at all.
Free compilers/tools available (I'm not looking to fork out $$ for MS compiler if there's a free one): Quite a few of them and one a lot of people use is GNU for windows and M$ has a free command line toolkit people use. The last one I used was MSVC2003 Toolkit. It is MSVC7.1 without the IDE.
Learning resources: Virtually the entire web and it is how I program when I am on a project.
Powerful: C++ is very powerful but it lacks in certain things. DB programming is one I heard it hurts in. Perl is nice for DB programming or the newer Ruby that is starting to come on the radar.

C# AND .NET are utter crap in my opinion. C# reminds me so much of VB it isn't even funny and besides both of those take a mild to a serious hit in speed and performance BUT C# (made for monkeys) has many macros built in that you must program in C++.

Ahh I've been thinking of taking up C# myself...you think it's a load of crap? I thought it was the latest and greatest language to use and would surpass C++ in time...


Maybe I need to do some homework on the issue before I commit myself. I thought that C# might be for me, because I'd probably only use it a bit here and there to write game plugins or macros.

Well, it has issues and the 10-40% hit in performance I can't tolerate.

I am serious when I say it reminds me of VB and it is because the language was written for monkeys, no offense. It is easier to learn and you can do things in it extremely fast which businesses love but that speed to the desktop comes at the expense of the managed code and the that average 24% hit in speed. Thats pretty damn huge but when Bill Gates was asked about it he simply said we would just need faster hardware and it was cheap. That is that fuckers answer to everything to just upgrade the hardware which is a load shit from him.

Program efficiently is my motto or at least try but I do see the reason C# exists just not one I would care to indulge for myself for anything I program.

Depends what you want to do really.

All the MS languages have a free compiler if you download the .Net SDK. Programming in Notepad with command line compilers is not much fun, but there are free products like SharpDevlop that provide a graphical IDE over the free compilers.

I'm typing this at work, with a VS.Net 2005 C# project open, a legacy VB6 component running in a debugger while I watch what it's doing with a large scale CRM application, and about 15 SQL Server query windows open, running various SQL queries against a 300GByte data warehouse. Maybe that makes me half-monkey, but whatever, if Mr. "Halfway to the monkey house" is my job title, I'll take it because I've never been out of work & never short of money.

There will always be language bigots and every programming forum on the internet will occasionally erupt into "VB sucks, no you suck, no Java sucks, no you suck even more for liking Java, hey fuck you, Sun Microsystems can lick my balls, hey Mr. Bill Gates ass-licker, go play hide and go fuck your code with VB6"

Ahem.

It doesn't matter. If you don't understand algorithms and the fundamentals of programming it doesn't matter what language you use. Just try them all, you'll find 1 (or several) that "fit".

Thanks for the input all.

I agree with Ipa but he did not touch upon the fact that C# and .NET is *always* slower than C++ It is just the way it is for C# and .NET stuff.

Bigotry has nothing to do with that and it is like Java which I do happen to think sucks in only two areas and that is that everything I have seen written in it is a resource hog and the resulting code is much larger than the same thing written in C++. Only negative things I can say about Java but I don't despise any languages except C# and the .NET stuff.

Call me a bigot if you will but I simply cannot accept C# or .NET as a quality programming environment.

use perl.

someone please tell me why a 'regular expression' is the most irregular thing one would ever see.

How can you know what a regex is, and not know how to Google for a regex validator ?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navc...regex+validator

Yep, but I prefer the offline versions Ipa.

I use a simple program called The Regex Coach and it works really well while not being GINORMOUS (over bloated) in size.