Author: Graham Laight
Date: 01:03:43 08/01/03
Go up one level in this thread
On July 31, 2003 at 12:46:27, Omid David Tabibi wrote: >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. >> >>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. > >When you learn C++ (which includes C in itself), you can very easily learn Java >later. But it doesn't work the other way round: when you get comfortable with >Java, you simply won't grasp the bizarre way the pointers work... > >In many programs Java would be a better choice than C/C++, but a programmer >should always have the skill to write optimized code when needed. > >Recently there was some initiative to replace C++ with Python as the main >programming language in our CS department. That initiative was fortunately >blocked, now we just have to block Java from taking over :) If it was up to me, >I would have replaced all those Prolog/Scheme/etc courses with more >C/C++/Assembly stuff! Why the hell should the students learn Prolog these days?! If I were writing a rules-based expert system, and I was given a choice between Prolog and assembly, I know which I'd choose* - even if it meant that the resulting system would take a tenth of a second to make a decision rather than a hundreth! -g *Assuming it wasn't a time-critical application >>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? >> >>It seems to me that this is analogous to what you have done with your >>programming curriculum. >> >>-g
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