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What are you programming in?

Catwell

What are you programming in these days? For me it's Assembly and some C/C++. But it seems that it's becoming time to move past all the old tried and true languages for the new. Now you have to know C#.net, Java, and whatever syntax you need for whatever new processor you have to work with. For example, you can't be a straight HTML programmer anymore, you need to know Flash, SQL scripting, CSS, Shockwave, HTML5, and whatever the flavour of the month is, to a high degree of proficiency. It's a lot to know. So, how do you choose what to learn? A few people I knew several years ago were learning Python and Fortran from some reason or other, boasting it's where Engineers have to migrate. Neither of them used those languages. Now they are studying Java and Objective C. To avoid this cycle of learn then learn another, what should we all program in?

 

Cabe

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    Languages are a tool.  Saying that you prefer one over the other is like

    saying that because Agilent make the best Spectrum Analysers

    (which they may?) means they make all the best test instruments.

     

    If you understand the principals of what you want some hardware/firmware

    do, then the process of manipulating the syntax of a language to achieve

    that end is of secondary importance.

     

    Learning how to drive one's text editor more efficiently is probably going to

    give you better productivity gain than swapping from one high level language to

    another.

     

    I mainly use C and occasionly some Assembler.  The latter for low level

    interrupt handlers and occasionly on some 8/16 bit micros to squeeze a little

    more performance from some CPU intensive tasks.

     

    I switched from Fortran IV to C in 1980.  Most engineers used to use

    Fortran as it had the most extensive and portable libraries.  C had a

    better library set, so most switched in the late 70s, and early 80s.

     

    Also, with pointers, C had an in-built mechanism to efficiently deal with

    memory-mapped registers, and, being first written for PDP computers, it ran

    easily on DEC computers.  This allowed more code to be written in C as

    against Assembler.

     

    DEC computers were the dominant computers in engineering and computer

    science departments globally in the late 70s, and through the 80s.

     

    I have used Pascal, Delphi, VB, VC++, G++, shell scripts, awk.

     

    I am playing around with an application at the moment, where I am porting

    a shell script to run with tk/tcl.  If my firm's clients didn't use Windows, I'd

    write the app to run as a GUI app under Linux.

     

    Ie it is just a question of using the tool best suited to the task, and then

    manipulating that tool to do what I want.

     

    David leComte

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  • 0

    Languages are a tool.  Saying that you prefer one over the other is like

    saying that because Agilent make the best Spectrum Analysers

    (which they may?) means they make all the best test instruments.

     

    If you understand the principals of what you want some hardware/firmware

    do, then the process of manipulating the syntax of a language to achieve

    that end is of secondary importance.

     

    Learning how to drive one's text editor more efficiently is probably going to

    give you better productivity gain than swapping from one high level language to

    another.

     

    I mainly use C and occasionly some Assembler.  The latter for low level

    interrupt handlers and occasionly on some 8/16 bit micros to squeeze a little

    more performance from some CPU intensive tasks.

     

    I switched from Fortran IV to C in 1980.  Most engineers used to use

    Fortran as it had the most extensive and portable libraries.  C had a

    better library set, so most switched in the late 70s, and early 80s.

     

    Also, with pointers, C had an in-built mechanism to efficiently deal with

    memory-mapped registers, and, being first written for PDP computers, it ran

    easily on DEC computers.  This allowed more code to be written in C as

    against Assembler.

     

    DEC computers were the dominant computers in engineering and computer

    science departments globally in the late 70s, and through the 80s.

     

    I have used Pascal, Delphi, VB, VC++, G++, shell scripts, awk.

     

    I am playing around with an application at the moment, where I am porting

    a shell script to run with tk/tcl.  If my firm's clients didn't use Windows, I'd

    write the app to run as a GUI app under Linux.

     

    Ie it is just a question of using the tool best suited to the task, and then

    manipulating that tool to do what I want.

     

    David leComte

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