Miscellaneous > Programming & Networking
Basic Programming for an utter novice.
voidmain:
Naw, I changed my mind. Calum, you should learn COBOL. Second choice would be FORTRAN. I actually spent a few years as a FORTRAN programmer. I hear the future is going to be in COBOL though.
[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
psyjax:
quote:Originally posted by VoidMain:
Naw, I changed my mind. Calum, you should learn COBOL. Second choice would be FORTRAN. I actually spent a few years as a FORTRAN programmer. I hear the future is going to be in COBOL though.
[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
--- End quote ---
Arent COBOL and FORTRAN dead? I have seen FORTRAN programms on punchcards :D .
And as far as C/C++ I would go with C all the way. I don't know about cleaner code, C to me flows alot more elegantly and simply than C++ . For the type of programming I do, It makes little diffrence what language I use so I just stick with what comes naturaly, and C is very natural and intuative once you work at it.
voidmain:
I don't know of too many places doing new development in COBOL but it was huge, and there are still many 20 year old COBOL mainframe apps doing key financial business. I think Y2K gave a lot of companies a way to get rid of much of their COBOL. I learned it in programming school but I realized at the time that I learned it that I would certainly never use it (I had already been programming in other languages for years before that). I actually sort of like FORTRAN. I worked in a weather/scientific shop and FORTRAN is really good for that sort of stuff.
[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Centurian:
Hey BadKarma,
quote:Originally posted by BadKarma:
And I would rather maintain tens of thousands of lines C++ code (which probably isn't even written by myself) then the same program in assembler.
--- End quote ---
HEHEH Yep whatever works for us.
VoidMain,
I know you were joking and I also know your a purist with regard to C/C++ but it is funny you should mention Fortran and COBOL. About a year ago I was at a friends house and he was telling me about the great new programming languages he had just gotten. Turned out they were Fortran and COBOL for windows. He was particularly into COBOL (the wordy language). I laughed all the way home that day.
Actually Fortran is extremely powerful. You can do damn near anything with it. It is great for scientific programming but also nice for graphics and even supports pretty decent database handling.
voidmain:
COBOL is *extremely* wordy. Their attempt was to create a language that really wouldn't require a "programmer" but that secretaries could even use. Don't believe it quite reached that goal but all I know is, I hate it. I don't know about graphics in FORTRAN as all of my programming in FORTRAN was done on a mainframe green screen. We did use a lot of data from DB2 databases (huge amounts of data), however the power is in the math. The FORTRAN math library is probably better than any other language. And I found it to be a very easy language to learn.
I did do a certain amount of Assembler on PCs back in the old days. I really liked Turbo Assembler. I thought it was much better than MASM. But I too would rather program in C any day of the week. It was fun to dabble with and I believe that anyone who wants "Engineer" to be part of their job title in computers, ASM should be a prereq. You really get an understanding about how computers work (processor/RAM/disk) when you learn ASM. And it really helps you in all other languages. And you can even read a Dr Watson message in Winders and be able to better point a finger at a troublesome app. I just recently pinpointed a problem in a large accounting app (running under NT/Citrix) and was able to then ask the developer very pointed questions regarding our problem. This allowed them to pinpoint the "bug" in their application and provide us with a fix very quickly.
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