SMBC Comics Forum

What's everyone's favorite to write in? More particularly, what seems to have the best balance of elegant syntax and low-levelness?

I'm semi-familiar with C++ and Perl. C++ is super-fast, but pointers (especially arrays) are kind of awkward and polymorphism in C++ continues to escape me. Perl has very intricate and powerful syntax, but I wouldn't want to use it for, say, real-time signal processing or something else that requires speed in computation.

I only program in A++.

I prefer English.

It's convenient for someone who doesn't know anything about programming.

pretty sure only gays and childless women write in anything but assembly

Edminster wrote:pretty sure only gays and childless women write in anything but assembly

Good thing I fall into both categories then, gives me a good excuse

I just hardwire everything, which could possibly explain all the bleeding.

I program in doublespeak.

It's doubleplus unhard!

Taking visual basic now. Made a simple hoursworkedxpayrate=grosspay when the button was clicked, couldn't even get into debug mode. I'm screaming WAIT WHAT every time something new is mentioned. Hopefully all those xkdc comics I've read will teach me something.

You still exist? That's good.

I swear its the fact I haven't had internet in over a year.

sotic wrote:What's everyone's favorite to write in?

Java, definitely Java. I love it. I breath it. (I have wished it had a Pascal-style syntax instead of a C-style syntax, but one gets used to everything.)

At work we use ABAP, that turned out to be surprisingly neat, too. Even though it looks really weird at first, kinda lika COBOL.

Assembly language and microcode were fun at uni, but not for real stuff.

Python + OpenGL was good enough for 3D programming. I don't want to use a dynamically typed language for any larger project, though. Except if it were a 3D programming project.

Let's not speak of my adventures in Visual Basic programming. It probably caused brain damage.

I wish not to see Scheme or other LISP or other functional code again. It damages the soul.

I learned PHP recently because I needed it. It's good for its use case, I guess. Not a very nice language, though.

Turbo Pascal (or nowadays, because of object orientation, it would be Delphi) was a great programming language to start to learn programming.

I programmed a bit in C and C++. Allocating memory and throwing around pointers is not for me.

I personally don't like Java. Classes are so much more intuitive and workable in C++ (even if you have to have a semicolon after the class declaration), and Java is just slow. To be fair, I've never done any graphical programming in any language, and I hear Java is easier for that, especially since it's multi-platform.

I tried Python once. Whitespace really threw me off, as well as its decidedly verbose syntax. Like, who ever thought that "for x in range(0,10)" was a good idea to make standard? C-style loops aren't that much better, but they're far more flexible. My personal favorite is Perl's "foreach $n (0..10)" or "foreach (@my_array)".

Lisp seems really intimidating, but the notion of "everything is a data point" seems really cool to me. A few books down my reading list is a guide to Common Lisp.


Of course, I'm just an amateur, so everything I just said could be dead wrong.

sotic wrote:I tried Python once. Whitespace really threw me off, as well as its decidedly verbose syntax. Like, who ever thought that "for x in range(0,10)" was a good idea to make standard? C-style loops aren't that much better, but they're far more flexible. My personal favorite is Perl's "foreach $n (0..10)" or "foreach (@my_array)".

Python for-loops are just as flexible as Perl ones. Instead of the range(0,10) just create a different (iterable) object (= kinda like an array).

Neither are as flexible as C-style loops, unless there's some other syntactic construction I'm not aware of. Stuff like "for (int i=0; mystr != '\0'; i++)" (although it's only necessary for C-strings) or "for (int i=1; i<N; i*=2)". How would one double the iterator after each pass in Python?

edit: I suppose you could just use a while loop, but where's the fun in that?

I know a little Python! Woo!

That is all I can contribute. I can also do a little bit with HTML and CSS.

I've heard that Ruby is really handy to know. The same people spoke highly of Java.