Re: Programming Languages, "to C or not to C, that is the Q."

[Peter.Robinson@t-online.de (Peter Robinson)]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 18:22, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Franki wrote:
> > It also depends on your coding habits.. well written, well indented Perl 
> > is very easy to read.
> 
>      I beg to differ.  It isn't that Perl cannot be well indented and "well 
> written" the problem is that both of those are highly subjective.
> 
>      I found my Perl quite readable.  So did my friends and peers.  However to 
> get to that state I had to throw away about 1/2 of the syntax Perl offers.  In 
> the end when comparing my Perl code to my Python code to do similar work the 
> Perl code, when one removed the braces, resembled my Python code.  The 
> difference is there was no magical line noise to mungle through.  Each 
> comparable construct in Python was far more readable than the same in Perl for 
> that one simple reason.  Since the magical line noise is at the core of Perl 
> one simply cannot throw it away like one can the many variations of if, for 
> example.


I was meaning not to chime in on this discussion, but I think people are
missing the point. You can write clear or befuddled code in any language
you choose, and saying perl is harder to understand is kind of like
saying Chinese is harder to understand than English if that happens to
be your native language. Perl makes doing some things remarkably easy
and elegant. 
For people considering what language to learn I would recommend learning
1) C (to get some idea of of how programs interact with the hardware) 2)
Some object oriented language (Java or C++ depending on what you want to
do -- it is always important not to reinvent the wheel too often, so
take a look at some of the available programming libraries) 3) A
scripting language such as Perl to do text parsing and to "glue" other
things together and 4) whatever else you specifically need. 
Since perl, C and Java or C++ all have very many similarities, once you
learn one you should be able to pick up the others more quickly. 
just my 2c,
Peter

-- 
Peter N. Robinson
peter.robinson@t-online.de
peter.robinson@charite.de
http://www.charite.de/ch/medgen/robinson/