On Monday 05 February 2001 17:48, filip wrote:

Hi all,

This might be OT. I'd just like an advise ( not too technical ) on the approach of choosing a progr. language for my son. I've read a lot of topics but cannot sort things out. I've been out of PC+prog. since +/-25 years (the time of fortranIV )( except this year with suse and really it makes me feel younger). Correct me if I'm wrong : we have roughly 2 main directions, the strucured language and the object oriented language. Now, what is the best to learn first in terms of the actual context?

Fortran IV - That was the first language I learned in Grad school, about 35 years ago!!! Concerning languages: the best tool for the job. Some languages are good at solving some problems and other languages are good at solving other problems. From a Linux viewpoint (and current atmospheric conditions in the general programming world) the two most popular languages are C/C++ and Java. By a recent job count there are around 38,000 jobs available in C++ and about 28,000 in Java. VB comes in a distant 3rd.

Then I have a personnal question : the more you get closer to the CPU ( in language level ) the more the instructions have to be structured and sequenced. So how is the object code dealing with that. I know its a huge question but some reply lines will definetly satisfy my curiosity. Really TIA Filip.

All coding is structured and sequenced in one way or another. There are five qualities of any language: input, output, sequence, choice and repititon. Programming has, for modern languages, moved into the 'event' model, which lends itself to objects very well. Event programming doesn't depend on a top-down sequential run of a code, except perhaps in the event method it self. Most methods (self-contained blocks of code) are triggered by inputs from the user, and the order in which events are fired are up to the user, for the most part. JLK -- "God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are a gift of God? Thomas Jefferson - 1781

I'd just like an advise ( not too technical ) on the approach of choosing a progr. language for my son. I've read a lot of topics but cannot sort things out. I've been out of PC+prog. since +/-25 years (the time of fortranIV )( except this year with suse and really it makes me feel younger). Correct me if I'm wrong : we have roughly 2 main directions, the strucured language and the object oriented language. Now, what is the best to learn first in terms of the actual context?

You don't say what he hopes to achieve with the language. If he wants to do application stuff, then C (with GTK) or C++ (with Qt) would be best. If he wants to do web work then Perl or Java would be most useful. If he wants to do Windows stuff then presumably VB, but if that were the case you wouldn't be asking here. There's others: I love Tcl, but I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner because it's a bit "odd" as languages go. It seems that object oriented languages are here to stay, so that's probably a better route to go than the old procedural style, although I must say I've never been convinced by the OO arguments. But even true procedural stuff like Perl is now largely OO based; Python is totally OO and many people swear by it. OO is harder for beginners IMHO because it drags the design into the code. That's no bad thing, but as a beginner learning programming, having to learn design too makes life harder. If the object of the exercise is just to get him learning the art, I'd suggest Java. It's more modern than C++ and has a cleaner design. Perl would be good and is quite easy. The problem with Perl is that the code he would want to look at to learn from would be horrible. It's easy to write clean code in Perl, but most people use the horrible, unreadable features of the language to make "write only" code. One other thing - at least start him off with command line tools. People who learn via an IDE get so far, then find they don't know what a compiler or linker actually does. IDEs are great for rapid development and debugging, but for learning what is going on, just hitting F9 and having a program fall out doesn't really make it clear.

Then I have a personnal question : the more you get closer to the CPU ( in language level ) the more the instructions have to be structured and sequenced. So how is the object code dealing with that. I know its a huge question but some reply lines will definetly satisfy my curiosity.

"Smart" compilers creating bloated code. Whatever you write you get structure you never asked for. When the language itself has builtin structure, like classes and so on, the object code carries that baggage. If your application uses it, fine. If it doesn't, you have it anyway. That's why "Hello world!" in assembler is a few dozen bytes, in C it's a couple of K and in C++ it's 35K.