Page 2 - C/C++ was my first prog. language...

Hi All,
I am kinda surprised that nobody mentioned Pascal as yet. I learnt Pascal in high skool and hated it back then. But after looking at some of the code snippets floating arnd now a days , i find Pascals structured style of writing very appealing, not only for readability but writability too. So lrng it first sets u in the rite direction, i think.
Wot say......

DA

Pascal, like BASIC is a good stepping stone to learning the fundamentals of programming. Most schools teach Pascal now as the beginning language instead of BASIC I believe.

Pascal is plain ugly. Its syntax is incosistent, Borland's compiler and IDE are both stupid (the debugger is even worse) and trust me that it is well possible to write extremely unstructured code in Pascal - that's what I'm seeing at school.

We've got a Win 2k network with Gigahertz clients and are programming in a language that is simply dead - except at schools. Would anyone of you mention knowledge of Pascal to a potential employer?

BASIC is even more useful because programs can be written without bothering about useless stuff - compare:


I haven't checked the syntax, but hope you get the idea - in Basic, only the actual code is written. In Pascal, you get lots of useless stuff extra.

Ok, what do you expect from school. You aren't going to see much well structured code from people that are learing. That is something that comes from experience and time.

Who would mention knowledge of pascal? Pascal is as usefull as basic in that it is a good tool to start you down the path the learn with, but not to write well structured applications. Granted, every once in a while you find someone doing something in basic. But then again, you have people who program in delphi, which is not much more that a beefed up pascal.

It all boils down to you have to start somewhere. Basic and Pascal are good places to start, just don't stay there.

You have to start somewhere, and I think where you start determines what you feel is the best thing to start with. Alright, yeah, I had to do some BASIC in middle school and I did some QBASIC at home back in the days of DOS 5, but then I hopped right into HyperText which is a C-wannabe type of language. I hated all of them, except QBASIC because it was fun to play with.

I muddled around with HTML and became proficient at coding pages by hand in Notepad back when the only WYSIWYG was HotDog. Then, when I learned about JavaScript I started the whole copy and paste thing. It wasn't until a few months ago that I decided to open up my copy of Programming with Perl and seriously dive in that I actually became deeply interested in programming. Now, here's why I think perl was the best thing for me to learn:

Community.

Man, the perl community is weird, but it's EXTREMELY helpful. When I started I had no idea even what less was, I couldn't get back into insert mode in VIm to save my life, and if you asked me to grep something I'd think it was some sort of nasty prank. Now, just three short months later, I'm finishing up a "password protection" scheme with perl at work for our Intranet that is totally maintenance free in normal conditions (since I am the only one of the two developers / admins of the Intranet that knows per). All because I had the support of the community and the massive amount of docs. I can use Linux as an average user, and I'm going to go back into C/C++, work on some Java, and maybe learn Python just for fun

But, that's just me...

I realise that Pascal makes us write a lot of stuff besides the actual code but when learners are made to conform to a certain style of coding they start off by learning to following standards. Once the initial stage is over they will branch out on their own anyway. If ones first language is a loose typed one like VB, then learning to code in C will be a real pain later. And that is my opinion........

DA

Pascal and a certain style of coding?? Imo it's uncertainty all the way ... semicolon or no semicolon?? Write a begin/end; block or not?

Yup (I should know ), but while Pascal is very strict with types, it hardly offers any posibilities for type casting, making it extremely difficult to program efficiently - why shouldn't bool be the same as integer, why shouldn't char be the same as unsigned byte?

I first started learning Visual Basic, but that was so crap I've forgotten everything about VB (and don't want to remember it)

I've self taught PHP, it has the advantage of a shallow learning curve, and as your project gets bigger, you start understanding basics of classes, etc. I've also read some stuff on C++ but never done any real programs with it.

I'm now learning Java at school, and knowing basics of programming from PHP really helped, just the syntax is a bit different, and I do miss the extensive set of built in functions PHP has, oh well.

Lukily, C# is almost identical to Java on the dime, so after learning Java, and understand all the OO stuff, shifting to C# shouldn't be that hard as well.

You should code fortran (f77, not the newer wimpy versions) using ed. Be careful though, you might get noticeably more hirsute if you do this and develope personality traits like eschewing electronics calculators and getting in knock-down, drag-out fights over Fourier series implmentations...