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the curse of the computer industry is that you throw all your books away every 3 years and relearn it all. i wish i could come up with a decent answer to your question. i got a head full of systems that are all now obsolete.
even human language changes. the french i spoke 35 years ago in paris i am now having to reprogram to avoid appearing odd.
That's highly exaggerated. There may be a company or two who are foolish enough to push change for change's sake.
The hardware platform I work on is 45 years old. In that time we've gone through two programming languages, and four OSs. It's government contracting, hence the snail-like pace of change. So I suppose what I do is at the other end of what you describe.
Probably Ruby. But C is always a good choice. It's been around forever, there's so much cr*p that coded in C, I'm sure it will continue to be around forever, basically in the same form as it is today.
It's both, in fact. And it comes in several 'flavors' - both the OS and the programming language.
No, it's not both. It's an operating system. Maybe you're thinking of shell programming? That's not UNIX. That's whatever shell you're using (korn, bash, tcsh, etc.) If that's not what you're thinking of, can you post an example of "UNIX" code?
Yeah, Unix is indeed an OS and not a script/programming language. However, students may end up learning it anyways as part of their programming class, as it seems to be included in a lot of curriculums that teach C and Java, and part of an established platform to work off of. I remember in college, a computer science 101 course may test you on beginner Unix (permissions, navigation, copying files, root passwords, etc.). However, later on, we were told that we could code in whatever environment we wanted (hell, you M$ Notepad as an editor for all they cared) with the caveat that it had to work when going through a Unix terminal
Most if not all flavors and versions of Unix will also include a C, C++, and Java compilers. And also to run Perl scripts, and perhaps Python too.
Last edited by ackmondual; 02-05-2014 at 03:59 PM..
Wow! I'm glad that this generated a lot of discussion!
First of all, I haven't officially proposed this class, and even if/when I do, I may not be the one choosing the language. But this discussion has been helpful nonetheless.
Not surprisingly, it sounds like there's no one clear-cut answer, but it seems like the languages rising to the top are C++/C#, Java, and Python, so it's probably worthwhile to consider all of those. Possibly Perl too? Me, I learned Pascal my sophomore year of high school ('96-'97) and learned C++ my first semester of college ('99) - I've essentially forgotten them now, but I do have until September, so shouldn't be a big deal.
It's kind of embarrassing, but I don't know what "object oriented" means at the moment. I know, Google/Wikipedia will tell me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by snorpus
To me, the most important part of an introductory course is developing the student's problem solving ability (algorithm development), not the particular language used.
And this is absolutely correct. That's true of high school mathematics too - most students won't compute derivatives in the workplace, but learning calculus will "prepare their minds" for all the quantitative reasoning they will do. It's amazing how many people don't realize this.
I hate to break this to you, but that art of programming encompasses far more than website. You're not going to design and program an embedded control system in PHP.
Firstly you are responding to a post that I made in response to someone suggesting PHP was in decline. Secondly I've never suggested programming was soley for the web, if you take the time to read through my posts it's quite the opposite.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thecoalman
Different languages are going to have different things they are designed to do. A better comparison is to tools, perhaps you have two hammers. A regular hammer and sledge, you can pound in finishing nails with a sledge but not exaclty ideal if you can use a regular hammer. You may be able to get from point A to point B with two different ones but the one designed for that purpose is going to make it whole lot easier. PHP as mentioned is a server side language,.....
Well, these type of questions are typically not good.
The real answer is.. learn ANY programming language. The important part about programming is to learn how to program. From there you should be able to pick up any language relatively easy. I learned Matlab in college and was self taught at a young age with HTML and PHP and also looked at VB.
I can read any programming language and pick up on it pretty easily.
The trick is to understand programming so you can learn whatever language your future job wants you to know.
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