Re: How do you choose your programming language ?

--- In hackers-il-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Nadav Har'El" 
<nyh@xxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2005, ik_5 wrote about "[hackers-il] How do you
choose your programming language ?":
> > So, why don't you use Pascal if only part of what I say is true (and
> > all of it is true :P) ? First of all I think it's the name and the
> > connection of the name you have for "Pascal". 
> 
> Your long story (that I clipped) describes something very very different
> from what Pascal used to be. It reminds me of an old story, about some
> developer in 1960 (or whatever) being asked what programming language he
> thinks he'll be using in 2000, and he answered "I don't know which
programming
> language I will use, but I know its name will be Fortran". This joke
> turned up to be surprisingly true, with the advent of "Fortran 90" and
> "Fortran 95", which are similar to Fortran mostly in name.
Similarly, the
> Pascal that you describe is similar to the Pascal I used only in name.
> 
> Whenever someone tries to convince me to use "A new Fortran that has all
> the features of C" or "A new Pascal that has all the features of C++", I
> ask them - why should I use those "layer upon layer" languages,
instead of
> the one they are trying to emulate?

You are missing then a lot about Pascal :)
This is not a new Pascal, but rather the development of the language.
If you would have worked with Borland Pascal (Not Turbo Pascal), this
changes where less different then what you think on them now.

Pascal, or at least FPC and Delphi (that is ding for a long time now),
are not trying to mimic C or C++, rather it's an alternative. You have
in FPC macros, but not the type of macros that you will use in C or
C++. They wasn't planed to be one.

Pascal is the only language I know that does things different from any
other exited (used) language today. You can only dream on the RTTI
that FPC and Delphi have on C++ (I'm still learning the RTTI part in
FPC). 
In C++ you are most likely using STL to have the same features in
FPC/Delphi (I don't know the history of STL so I do not know what came
first). So why not to use a language that that thing "build in" ?

> 
> The reason I give these answers is not because I'm a C fanatic. I also
> give a similar answer when someone tells me of a "C++ library that has
> all the features of Perl" or a "C library that makes X programming
as easy
> as in Tcl/Tk" - why do I need those knockoffs, when I can use the
originals?
> 
> And note that I have nothing "religious" against using Pascal:
> In the late 80's, Turbo Pascal (on DOS) was my favorite language. I
still
> have in my cabinet at work 4 books: "Mastering Turbo Pascal 4.0", "Turbo
> Pascal 5.5 OOP Guide", "Turbo Pascal the Complete Reference" and "Turbo
> Pascal 6 the complete Reference", which as you can guess I never use
any more.
> The reason I liked Turbo Pascal was basically one: it allowed me to
write
> "graphical" programs, both using real graphics (I had just gotten my
first
> VGA card, and it was cool :)) and cursor (character-based graphics).
> At that time, I couldn't do some of these things on the monochrome Unix
> system I was using (I was already a good C programmer by that time -
Pascal
> was NOT my first language). But this was the only reason I liked Turbo
> Pascal - I didn't like its syntax, I didn't like its limitations,
and the
> speedy compilation (2 seconds to compile a file, instead of 10
seconds in
> C) was completely irrelevant even when I had a 16Mhz i386sx.
> 
> But as time passed, TP's only advantage became irrelevant. In 1990 I
wrote
> a C library that emulated Turbo-Pascal's character-graphics
features, in 1991
> we got (for real money!) a graphics library for our AT&T System V
machine,
> and in 1992 or 1993 we moved to Linux, and finally had X windows at
home.
> I never used Turbo Pascal since. And I do not miss it.
> 
> > Secondly The industry takes only languages that was giving to them
> > after chowing and a lot of money investment on them (take Java and C#
> > as two examples). 
> 
> Java "succeeded" (if you can call it that) because it had genuine
differences
> from existing languages. It wasn't the same as C++ with a different
syntax,
> or the same as Perl with a different syntax, and so on. It had something
> genuinely different to offer. Of course, you might argue (like I do)
if this
> "different" necessarily means better.
> 
> C# is a new fad which is very similar to Java, and it will only
succeed if
> Microsoft uses its monopoly to somehow enforce it. If Microsoft had
wanted,
> Pascal would have become a standard by now...

C# btw took a lot of things from Delphi as well (many "power features"
in C# are based on the Delphi implementation... at least the last time
I checked C#).

> 
> > So how do you choose your programming language, and will you use FPC
> > if it will not have the name Pascal inside, but will deliver you a
> > faster code development and and more stable code, in less time then
> > C#, Java, C, C++, VB and others ?
> 
> I try to learn as many languages as I can, and use for each job what is
> better. In the last year I probably programmed in C, C++, Java, Tcl,
> Perl, Awk, Zsh, Lisp, and probably a few others I forgot. Each language
> is best for a specific kind of task. Still, somehow I doubt that if I
> learned all the new bells-and-whistles of Pascal, it will add something
> new to my arsenal of languages. For the same reason, there are other
> languages I still haven't learn (though eventually I do plan to learn),
> like PHP and Python - because the tasks they excel in are already
"covered"
> by other languages I know.

These days (at work), I'm using a lot of Perl, Java, Javascript, CSS,
nasl and others... But, still I see that many things that I do with
Java for example, can be done much better and faster in FPC, with less
time spending on small things such as "should I use String or
StringBuffer", "did I passed it as null ?" etc.. 

> 
> 
> -- 
> Nadav Har'El                        |     Monday, Nov 21 2005, 19
Heshvan 5766
> nyh@xxxx             |-----------------------------------------
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The message above is just this
> http://nadav.harel.org.il           |signature's way of propagating
itself.
>





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