Re: Games in Java?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Bert Peers wrote:

<snip>
> Until then, you just discard CVs where Known Languages only lists "Java".

Personally, I'd throw away CV's that listed only 'C++' too - even though
my group at work uses only C++.

It's hard to learn your first programming language because you are also
learning programming.  It's hard to learn your second language because
everything you learned while picking up the first one were things that
you thought were universally true - and it comes as a shock to discover
just how different languages can be.

However, once you've learned two reasonably different languages, you
can switch to a new language in a month or so.

The most useful course I did at college was 'comparative languages'
in which we were taught a new programming language every week for
three terms (a total of 30 languages)...learning how to drive some
of the wierder ones (Snobol!) was most instructive...learning WHY
those languages are built that way is also instructive.

There is almost no such thing as a "bad" language - they were
all designed for a purpose - and in that niche are good at what
they do.  Things go wrong when you try to write AI programs
in SNOBOL, Graphics in Perl, 777 airliner flight controls
in C or a language translation program in assembler.

...except Fortran...there is no good thing you can write in
Fortran other than a program that searches your hard drive
for other Fortran programs and deletes them for you.

If more people realised this, there would be far fewer "holy
wars" about programming language choices.

> I must confess that all of the above is largely "imho" and
> "based on what I see around me".  I don't know how C++ eventually
> became to dominate the software market -- you could actually
> be right that it was the influx of C++ only guys ;)

It's probably more like all those C guys were offered a better
C with the (then magical) word 'OOPS' associated with it - and
snapped it up.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)



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