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Subject: Re: I am a sixteen yearold, novice programmer. I am looking for a chess

Author: Pat King

Date: 23:59:30 08/03/98

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On August 03, 1998 at 08:02:47, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>As wonderful as it is to have your own pet language and celebrate our
>differences, you should really learn C. I mean, almost every serious
>programming project is done in C.

Let the language wars begin!

Actually, there's a lot of "serious" development done in VB in the business
world, and there's this "new" thing called C++ that the kids are raving about.
Personally, I do most of my work in Pascal (Object oriented flavor). The C Nazis
will always complain about how slow other languages are, but if you're
comfortable with a language, then you're much more likely to be productive in
it.

And productivity is going to be important to you if you persue this chess
program. Even the simplest ones are pretty nontrivial, with the bad mistakes
being made over design issues, not coding issues. Since you're working in an
object-oriented language, take a lot of time identifying relevant objects and
seeing how they'll interact. Throw out your first couple of designs... they're
sure to have problems. Look for circular dependencies (A depends on B depends on
A, a bad thing) and useful abstractions (A game has players. A computer player
is a player. A human player is a player. "Game" should depend on "player", not
the more specialized "computer player" or "human player").

Once you've got a workable design, it can be coded in any language, really.

Just my two cents.

Have fun!

Pat



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