Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 08:19:29 07/31/03
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On July 31, 2003 at 04:17:47, Graham Laight wrote: >On July 30, 2003 at 00:00:54, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Depends on your ultimate goal. If you are going to be a programmer, it is >>not the best way to go. If you program in Java for 4 years, then leave and >>go to work where they use C, you have a _long_ learning curve. You've never >>seen pointers, for example. >> >>We took a _lot_ of heat about that from companies like BellSouth. > >It sounds to me as though Java is better than C, because it prevents errors with >type. That was the point behind Pascal. It was strongly typed, and once you get a clean compile, the program is generally correct except for logic errors. With C, compiling cleanly is just the first step in a complex process, as you can mis-match types, have truncation/rounding errors, pass invalid arguments to procedures, etc. > >For most businesses, the most pressing requirement is to make good code >cost-effectively - not to make super-fast code expensively. C is clearly going >to take longer to write and debug if it doesn't force type compatibility. Yes, but I also have a requirement for speed. IE what good is a 7-day weather forecast model if it takes 30 days to run? > >Imagine you were a medical professor. You teach your students to treat illness >with medicine. The local doctors complain, saying that the standard methodology >in your area is to treat illness with leaches. Would you change your curriculum? No. Leaches are _still_ used in medicine today, in fact. But that's apples and oranges. You have a fast treatment protocol and a slow one. The slow one is easier to do, and produces fewer errors. Unfortunately, if the prognosis is that the patient will die before the slow treatment can be completed, then you _must_ go to the faster one, even if there are more potential errors. Because slow == death. > >It seems to me that this is analogous to what you have done with your >programming curriculum. > >-g No, the reason Java is becoming popular is that (a) it handles the typing issues and eliminates pointers, a major source of errors AND (b) it is actually used in industry to write web applications. (b) is the only thing that makes it viable. (a) is just a nice academic "edge" that makes the learning process easier.
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