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Unread 29 Aug 2005, 22:56   #1
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What Language is the "best" to learn?

I know it's rather stupid, but I want to learn *some* language to be able to program in. I'm sure I'll find things to do with the languages once I learn them, but it appears I've got about a month, with a good couple of weeks containing large amounts of free time.
I'm leaning towards C++ (because it seems popular and able to cover lots of ground), and / or Perl (PA is coded in that, and from what I've read it seems to be able to do a lot of things C++ does only a lot more simply, despite the higher general overhead). My only worry about learning things like Perl is that (from what I've read from bits of my guides) it's a bit lax on syntax, which might be bad if I start learning other languages. Any suggestions as to what I should go for, and why?
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Unread 30 Aug 2005, 00:22   #2
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

If you've not programmed before, something that's hard-to-go-wrong-with like Java or C# is your best option. You'll learn the logic of object-oriented programming without all the ****ing about that C++ entails or the seemingly cryptic syntax of Perl.

To be honest, once you know basically *any* language, picking up others is a piece of piss (with exceptions, for instance knowing Java is of no consequence to learning Prolog). Since you're learning, you'd want something free and with a large community for support. Java and C# (express edition for the free win) seem good candidates.
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Unread 30 Aug 2005, 10:19   #3
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Ultimately which ever you feel most comfortable with.

Typically I'd suggest C++ for it's simply raw power. However C++ programmers are a dying breed, the world's gone OO mad and since like yourself a lot of n00bs are picking easier to learn high level languages it's also starting to dominate the market. I'd personally stay away from java though, nicely enough it's platform independant, but it's the most slow arse piece of shit to grace this planet.

Also, PA's gone to perl? yuck, if I ever considered returning to the game that's turned me away for good. Oh for the days it was coded in highly efficient C++ running as fast-CGI
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Unread 30 Aug 2005, 23:47   #4
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

comedy Pascal option
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Unread 31 Aug 2005, 05:28   #5
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by djbass
Typically I'd suggest C++ for it's simply raw power. However C++ programmers are a dying breed, the world's gone OO mad and since like yourself a lot of n00bs are picking easier to learn high level languages it's also starting to dominate the market. I'd personally stay away from java though, nicely enough it's platform independant, but it's the most slow arse piece of shit to grace this planet.

Also, PA's gone to perl? yuck, if I ever considered returning to the game that's turned me away for good. Oh for the days it was coded in highly efficient C++ running as fast-CGI
I'm not really into slating folk, especially people that are normally helpful, but that post was just utter shit.

Firstly, 'raw power' does not make for a good learning tool, especially for someone just starting out. It's far better to concentrate on learning language fundamentals and good application design without worrying about the delights of (for instance) memory management.

The sentence "However C++ programmers are a dying breed, the world's gone OO mad"... seems rather odd. I'm hoping its just because you strung 2 sentence together, rather than you implying C++ isn't an OO language. That would be quite the silly comment indeed.

The "easier to learn high level languages" are not dominating the market because "n00bs" are learning them at all. They are dominating because we live in a world we rapid development has become mandatory. Using a higher level language results in a much faster development time. It's also (normally) far cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem, than it is to pay someone to spend longer coding it in a lower level language. The games/multimedia industry is probably the only widely used exception to this.

I also find it very hard to understand why PA being programmed in Perl affects your decision to play it or not? I always thought it was the content of game that made it either appealing or appalling, not the language the developers used to build it.

"Hi, this game looks good, but can you tell me what language its written in so I can decide if I like it?".

Erm, yeah.

Anyway, as Pab has already said either Java or C# would be good starting languages to learn. They are both based on the OO paradigm, both free to get into, and both are very 'forgiving'. Knowing one OO language will put you in good stead to rapidly learn any of the others should you wish to change at a later date. It's only jumping paradigms that you would need to relearn, e.g. OO to functional.
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Unread 31 Aug 2005, 10:34   #6
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Raging.Retard
I'm not really into slating folk, especially people that are normally helpful, but that post was just utter shit.
At worst I'll admit it was brisk, but only due to the fact I realised by mid paragraph I was going off topic a little bit so I decided to cut my losses.

Quote:
Firstly, 'raw power' does not make for a good learning tool, especially for someone just starting out. It's far better to concentrate on learning language fundamentals and good application design without worrying about the delights of (for instance) memory management.
I never said it was a good learning tool, that's why I said 'typically' I would, to infer in this case I'm not recommending it. For flexability it wins hands down, but it has somewhat of a steep learning curve, so not very good except for the most keen of beginners.

Quote:
The sentence "However C++ programmers are a dying breed, the world's gone OO mad"... seems rather odd. I'm hoping its just because you strung 2 sentence together, rather than you implying C++ isn't an OO language. That would be quite the silly comment indeed.
It would be even sillier to suggest that C++ is a pure OO language. Yes it is founded on OO concepts, but it intentionally by design does not adhere strictly to the OO paradigm.

Quote:
The "easier to learn high level languages" are not dominating the market because "n00bs" are learning them at all. They are dominating because we live in a world we rapid development has become mandatory. Using a higher level language results in a much faster development time. It's also (normally) far cheaper to throw more hardware at a problem, than it is to pay someone to spend longer coding it in a lower level language. The games/multimedia industry is probably the only widely used exception to this.
Yes they are (and please forgive my use of the word "n00bs" there, it was not intended to be derogatory, rather a convenient short hand). Where are our next generation of talented young programmers coming from? Schools of course! You only need to look at the syllabus of most schools and universities to see they are primarily based around high level languages. Why is this so? because they are quick and easy to learn, great! except that they do not encourage the students enough to extend the concepts to other languages. Instead they become mindless drones fed the usual drivel by their lecturers until they become high on OO and go on to spread the gospel to the next unsuspecting generation of programmers after them, if I seem harsh on this issue it's becuase I'm trying desperatly to break this self-defeating cycle.

Quote:
I also find it very hard to understand why PA being programmed in Perl affects your decision to play it or not? I always thought it was the content of game that made it either appealing or appalling, not the language the developers used to build it.
I always saw it as a step forward when Vish decided to code PA in C++, at a time when Perl, ASP & PHP were becomming web-languages of choice. Speed is all that matters in a game like PA, this is not the playing ground for interpretive languages. It's true that for the frontend (the pages you see when playing), pulling DB queries and displaying the results is hardly taxing on resources and well within the limits of what an interpretive language can handle. You sure as hell though aren't going to convice me the ticker would be anywhere near as efficient at processing the game logic and updating the enormous DB as a compiled executable is. This is not even to mention all the wasted resources on porting the existing code over Perl, potentially introducing more bugs than would have been fixed by working with the original material. It represents backwards thinking to me, and this makes me question what direction the developers might be looking to take the game and how that directly affects gameplay, either now or in the future.
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Unread 31 Aug 2005, 16:30   #7
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Learn C/C++ at a first.

Benefits are clearly that you learn the inside on how programs work - learning Java or Delphi or VB or C# first hides a lot of the real world and common knowledge from you.
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Unread 31 Aug 2005, 16:47   #8
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

It depends on how you learn. I personally found PHP/Perl/etc to pickup much easier than my various attempts to learn C not because they were inherently easier (although they are) but because I could get immediate results with "realistic" small projects (writing dymanic websites, parsing large text files, sorting out mp3s, etc). With C++ you seem to have to do quite a lot to achieve very little which I found dampened by enthusiasm considerably.

Also, the amount of good free non-ad infested resources for these languages is immense.

I'd personally go for either C or Perl, although as Pabs said once you're familiar with certain concepts it's a lot easier to try others.
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Unread 31 Aug 2005, 23:33   #9
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

At uni, they taught us Java, and it was all very nice and logical, but getting anything impressive built took far too long.
With PHP, it's very quick to get something up and running that actually does something.

Even quicker, would be Ruby (on Rails), but I haven't used that enough to reccomend it to someone starting out, but you can certainly get results quickly.
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Unread 1 Sep 2005, 13:13   #10
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Heartless
Learn C/C++ at a first.

Benefits are clearly that you learn the inside on how programs work - learning Java or Delphi or VB or C# first hides a lot of the real world and common knowledge from you.
My option is delphi (which uses pascal as a base), its as fast (and sometimes faster) than C++, and its less cyptic (code is more plain english). Also you can find literally thousands of websites with code, turorials and addons for delphi such as

http://www.clootie.ru/ - This is a site for using DirectX 9c in delphi, it also has demo programs too.
cc.borland.com/community - This is a for C++, C#, Delphi and JBuilder(java)
www.torry.net - Loads of componants for delphi and coding tips too.
http://www.sourceforge.net - Loads of applications and with source code

Those are a selection of the ones I use the most.

Borland are now putting all their C, VB languages into the Delphi IDE, so you can do C++ code and delphi code with the same compiler!

I can hear a new head and shoulders type advert "Do you take two compilers with you in to the shower? Not any more with Delphi!"
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Unread 1 Sep 2005, 13:49   #11
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

C: puts("Hello, world!");
C#: System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");
C++: cout << "Hello, world!" << endl;
Delphi: WriteLn('Hello, world!');
Java: System.out.println("Hello, world!");
Perl: print "Hello, world!\n";
Python: print "Hello, world!\n"
Ruby: puts "Hello, world!"
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Unread 1 Sep 2005, 13:52   #12
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by queball
Perl: print "Hello, world!\n";
A simple text file with just that in it would run OK in Perl, that's not true for some of the other languages.
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Unread 1 Sep 2005, 13:53   #13
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
A simple text file with just that in it would run OK in Perl, that's not true for some of the other languages.
It's true for Python and Ruby too.

Full versions here
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Unread 10 Sep 2005, 18:13   #14
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Learn Turing first, it is ten times simper to learn then C++

Once you get familiar with "oh this is how arrays work..." and stuff like that then move onto something like C++.
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Unread 11 Sep 2005, 02:23   #15
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Actually MrLobster had the best suggestion yet, Delphi is actually an extremly good alternative to C++. It's very easy to pickup, it's classes and object heirachy are logical unlike Java. It's also very easy to transition from Delphi to C++ and vice versa.
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Unread 20 Sep 2005, 22:26   #16
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

There is plenty of good advice in this thread already, but I'd just like to bring up the point djbass made about the speed of the Java language. At one time early in it's evolution perhaps the comment "it's the most slow arse piece of shit to grace this planet" would have been true. However that certianly is not the case anymore. For the vast majority of applications developed in C++ or Java there is negligable speed difference and Java can even outperform C++. I don't mean to flame, merely to ensure noone bases their choice of language on comments such as those.
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Unread 23 Sep 2005, 10:54   #17
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by djbass
I always saw it as a step forward when Vish decided to code PA in C++, at a time when Perl, ASP & PHP were becomming web-languages of choice. Speed is all that matters in a game like PA, this is not the playing ground for interpretive languages. It's true that for the frontend (the pages you see when playing), pulling DB queries and displaying the results is hardly taxing on resources and well within the limits of what an interpretive language can handle. You sure as hell though aren't going to convice me the ticker would be anywhere near as efficient at processing the game logic and updating the enormous DB as a compiled executable is.
The main thing which allways stunned me as a software developer was the slowlyness of the ticker. This probably just had to do with the concept, implementation and use of SQL.

Having a good solution is anyway much more important to speed then the choice of your programming language.

However you should never mention speed with PA in the same sentence unless you do it with tears in your eyes ...
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Unread 23 Sep 2005, 16:26   #18
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramihyn
The main thing which allways stunned me as a software developer was the slowlyness of the ticker. This probably just had to do with the concept, implementation and use of SQL.

Having a good solution is anyway much more important to speed then the choice of your programming language.

However you should never mention speed with PA in the same sentence unless you do it with tears in your eyes ...
given the player base the ticker was quite fast, I can not recall it ever being slow during the time that spinner and crew were running it.
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Unread 23 Sep 2005, 18:13   #19
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramihyn
The main thing which allways stunned me as a software developer was the slowlyness of the ticker. This probably just had to do with the concept, implementation and use of SQL.
Hmmm. Up to 180k players build queues + 180k players resource changes + however many fleets were moving + however many battles were ongoing + any other changes = about ten minutes on reasonably modest hardware?

Didn't seem that slow. Undoubtedly their SQL could have been optimised (that's almost always true) but overall I think it's unfair to comment too harshly without seeing their code.
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Unread 23 Sep 2005, 20:20   #20
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Learn DHTML, for no good reason, apart from that it's quite cool. It'll get you started.
Learn C.
Then learn Lua, including how to embed it into C code in order to control C functions from Lua.
Learn how to use mod_lua.
Learn SDL.
Learn OpenGL.

Then you'll be able to create web-based application using lua that link to any C libraries you may want to use. You'll also be able to create games.

It's not the easiest or most conventional approach. But it's definitely the coolest.

Java is ok. I quite like the J2ME stuff. C++ is cool as far as learning about Object Orientated Programming goes. But it gets a bit much, in my opinion, when you start getting to the STL stuff. Python is probably one of the nicest languages to prototype stuff in, and one of the easiest languages to learn.

Oh, as you're starting out, Java may be your best bet. The only reason I say that is because its online documentation is excellent. Mind you, if you found a really good C/C++ book you'd be ok as well.
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Unread 24 Sep 2005, 15:30   #21
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

I would say it depends on what you want to write.

Each language has it's own strengths and weaknesses and there are the different methodologies to consider. Once you know one language it is relatively easy to move to another, but this transition will be made all the easier if you stick to one methodology.
Whether you go OO or structured or something else, there are a few things that will make your life easier and more productive:

1) Memory management - you don't really want to be worrying about allocating/freeing memory, dangling pointers and other pitfalls that come from not having something like garbage collection.

2) Error/exception handling - checking the return values of every little thing is basically a pain in the arse. Something with trys, throws, catches, whatever the language calls them, will save a lot of time.

3) Development environment/debugging tools - when something does go wrong, as it surely will, you'll want to be able to step through and see exactly what's going on. This almost goes without saying because modern IDEs take of you, but there are exceptions.

4) Portability - this is pretty much a given these days, which is good because you really don't want to bother yourself with character set changes, endian changes, and word size changes.

5) 3rd party support and resources - From time to time you are going to come up against problems that just baffle you. Being able to get your hands on examples and help from real people that have 'been there, done that' is invaluable.

I would say it's probably best to avoid C++ for reasons pablissimo hinted at. It isn't as clean as some higher level languages because it still contains C, making it very easy to write nasty ugly code.
Good luck with whatever you go for, just don't get too good or tell everyone how easy it is or I'll be out of a job

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Unread 26 Sep 2005, 11:28   #22
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Oh, I forgot to mention the most important thing.

The programming concepts are the same among all languages, of course there are different subsets of programming, object-orientated etc. So as soon as you've learnt one, you'll be able to pick up others relatively easily.

For instance, I spent a year learning and using C/C++ at university. In the second year I was able to learn Java in about 2 months.
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Unread 26 Sep 2005, 22:49   #23
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Weeks
The programming concepts are the same among all languages, of course there are different subsets of programming, object-orientated etc. So as soon as you've learnt one, you'll be able to pick up others relatively easily.

For instance, I spent a year learning and using C/C++ at university. In the second year I was able to learn Java in about 2 months.
Learn Lisp, Prolog, C and Java and say again that "the programming concepts are the same"

C++ and Java are the same language "class".

ps: im generous and put UPN languages into the structural language class.
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Unread 27 Sep 2005, 00:25   #24
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Hmmm. Up to 180k players build queues + 180k players resource changes + however many fleets were moving + however many battles were ongoing + any other changes = about ten minutes on reasonably modest hardware?

Didn't seem that slow. Undoubtedly their SQL could have been optimised (that's almost always true) but overall I think it's unfair to comment too harshly without seeing their code.
Well ... it would take a lengthy posting to explain in detail why i think so. I will try a brief answer.

I remember other numbers then 10 minutes but lets assume it was 10 minutes. That means it took 600 seconds or in other words it calculated 300 planets (with the given 180k) a second.

2001 ... moderate computers ... but 4 servers - ok lets assume 3 where serving webpages and only one was used for calculation (which in my eyes would be like a misconfiguration but ok). A moderate CPU to that time roughly had a power of 3500 MIPS. As all Operations really just "needed" to be done in integers (admittedly often in 64bit integers on 32bit machines) and due to the amount of data going into a calculation beeing rather small, memory bandwidth wouldnt be a big issue during this (only thinking about memory bandwidth problems with a measily 300 planets calculated each second is a joke by itself...). Lets round it down to 3000 MIPS and we end up with 10 MIPS needed for each planet.

This obviously is a synthetic number but feel free to slash it by 4 for latency issues, cache misses, 64bit integer arithmetic etc. - we still have 2.5 Million Instructions CPU power needed for a single planet?

Ok so what is the most complex operation done during this?

Back in that time we where told that combat calculation is really complex and time consuming. If you think about the production, resource adding each tick, res/con advancement - obviously the combat calculation is much more complex. I wrote a Toolbox back then and spend a lot time making the combat calculations 100% accurate. At the end they matched the actual PA numbers very precisely. The most important thing i learned during that was that you dont need to calculate combat iteratively.

My optimized C code did several million combat calculations in a few seconds. I dont have concrete numbers at hand anymore but it was so fast that i used a brute-force iterative algorithm to optimize combats instead of a half-serious implementation even like alpha-beta pruning.

As you can (IMHO) see - the speed was way too bad for bad coding. Thats (among other things like the infamous "connection-pooling announcement") the reason why i wrote:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramihyn
This probably just had to do with the concept, implementation and use of SQL.
Now maybe the code of the ticker was well thought out and heavily optimised but that would just sound misguided to me as the endresult was so "bad".

Using a SQL DB was a good idea when you had 185k players and the future looked bright and you target 1mil and more players, but to think that a SQL DB is queried for a few thousand datasets nowadays, is kind of eyebrow raising.

Oh well - maybe my words where "too harsh", but maybe you can understand why the speed of the PA ticker really doesnt "impress" me as somebody who has his roots in the demoscene where counting cycles and doing hardcore optimising is a essential part of code development
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Unread 27 Sep 2005, 13:00   #25
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramihyn
Using a SQL DB was a good idea when you had 185k players and the future looked bright and you target 1mil and more players, but to think that a SQL DB is queried for a few thousand datasets nowadays, is kind of eyebrow raising.

Oh well - maybe my words where "too harsh", but maybe you can understand why the speed of the PA ticker really doesnt "impress" me as somebody who has his roots in the demoscene where counting cycles and doing hardcore optimising is a essential part of code development
Sure.

I admit I misunderstood your post originally, I thought you meant they had mis-used SQL (in terms of they had done it badly) rather than they shouldn't have used it at all. I see your point now. However, the use of SQL makes sense in terms of general administration, ease of development, etc, etc. You're correct, re-writing it more "directly" would have made it several orders of magnitude faster but it'd be rather nightmarish to administer / develop in some fashion, etc.
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Unread 29 Sep 2005, 20:40   #26
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Python is my language of choice both professionally, and as a beginners language.

Let me explain my background, which implies my reasoning. I first started programming in C, but it was only after I got to uni and learned proper programming that I was able to use it to anything useful. At uni, we were taught Simula, and later on Java but with a few courses that dealt with the low-level languages like C and Assembler. After a while, we were taught Perl, Python and Tcl, and my personal favourite of the three is Python. Python is by far the better language for learning the basics of programming and learning a few proper coding techniques that are all too easy to miss using other languages.

Python isn't just a beginners language either. These days, I work as a game-developer. We're using C++ for the actual game and level editor, and Python for a lot of related tools. At some point they were considering developing the whole game using Python, but at the time they weren't confident that Python was mature enough. These days you hear about games where large parts of the gamelogic is written using Python, and toolkits like PyGame make it probable that full games will be written in Python pretty soon.

To sum it up, as others have said, the important thing is finding a language teaches you the fundamentals of software design, and you'll be able to pick up other languages easier (I haven't had more than a couple hours of training in C++ before starting my job, but still am able to pick it up and write decent code, because I have a general education at the base).

Start with the tutorial, and go from there: http://docs.python.org/tut/
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Unread 6 Oct 2005, 10:29   #27
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

i would think .NET but it depends on what path you want to go down, im pondering over the same question.
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Unread 6 Oct 2005, 14:02   #28
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

.NET isn't a language, it's more of a platform. There are four obvious .NET-based languages in use, C#, J#, C++.NET and VB.NET. There are others of course, there's a version of Perl that runs against the CLR, Python, hell there's even a version of ML that compiles against the thing, but the majority of 'good' online documentation and tutorials cover those first four.
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Unread 28 Oct 2005, 15:44   #29
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Demon Dave
comedy Pascal option
you dont realise that pascal is the language taught at a-level computing alongside vb.

yes pascal in the real world doesnt do much for you as most people writing bespoke programs would at least of used delphi and not many do that. only one company that ive come across in the UK. however learning pascal is valuable as it teaches you the basics and its then easy to switch from pascal to C then to C# meaning you can write your own OS. also it makes switching to most higher level languages and most assembly languages quite easy too.

so my advice would be to find somewhere that has posted the cirriculum for an a-level course or university course and see what the proffesionals do. this is the easiest way to get into programming (basically why they do it)

hope that helps
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Unread 28 Oct 2005, 17:50   #30
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramihyn
I wrote a Toolbox back then ..
which was ace btw
but comparing pa from back then with any _proper_ software is a joke (i can just say "burp"), but i think that this has much to do with the way some stuff were/are done (or does the pa team still have the c++ source ? )

but to post something on the topic too:
i would NEVER start using c (or c++ for that matter), because this is way to low level and really hard to grasp for a beginner programmer, but choose some language where you can get fast results with little apps (basicly every _modern_ scripting language) and once you understood the basics of how stuff works move to something closer to the hardware. The language itself doesn't really matter that much at all, as the first things you have to understand is the concepts (ignoring esoteric stuff like lisp, fortran, etc
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Unread 29 Oct 2005, 18:22   #31
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

If you start with high-level languages you normally don't learn the essential low-level stuff. You start off with vectors etc not pointers and arrays.
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Unread 30 Oct 2005, 01:32   #32
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by steve
you dont realise that pascal is the language taught at a-level computing alongside vb.
actually, i do realise that, as i've been there, done that and got the A-Level. Pascal is a decent language to learn the basics of structered programming and programming conventions (things like putting ; in the right place, which it insists on) and one that i actually like quite a bit. But it is very limited in what it can do
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Unread 30 Oct 2005, 11:23   #33
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Quote:
Originally Posted by djbass
I always saw it as a step forward when Vish decided to code PA in C++, at a time when Perl, ASP & PHP were becomming web-languages of choice. Speed is all that matters in a game like PA, this is not the playing ground for interpretive languages. It's true that for the frontend (the pages you see when playing), pulling DB queries and displaying the results is hardly taxing on resources and well within the limits of what an interpretive language can handle. You sure as hell though aren't going to convice me the ticker would be anywhere near as efficient at processing the game logic and updating the enormous DB as a compiled executable is. This is not even to mention all the wasted resources on porting the existing code over Perl, potentially introducing more bugs than would have been fixed by working with the original material. It represents backwards thinking to me, and this makes me question what direction the developers might be looking to take the game and how that directly affects gameplay, either now or in the future.
PA went to perl with the complete recode and redesign Spinner did for round 10. No doubt the next complete redesign and recode will bring some sort of language change as well. The crucail thing for us is to be able to develop quickly, and as such using the language that our coders are most comfortable makes most sense - if we have speed issues we can allways ask jolt for a faster server - though our current server is quite snazzy.
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Unread 22 Nov 2005, 16:40   #34
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Learn C or C++, once you have good understanding of either of them the world is your oyster.

OO languages are nice but with so many people learning them by simply picking up a book etc there worth is dwindling, the reason C & C++ have been around so long is because they are very powerful languages and are very versatile, also they are reasonably hard to learn so not any old joe can use them (although many have tried).

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Unread 23 Nov 2005, 03:11   #35
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

.NET is the future for C based languages where Windows programming is required.

Surely it'd be wiser to learn C# than C or C++ ?

I guess it depends on what you want to do - but if you're a newbie you'll see quick(er) results playing with C# and if you're dedicated a good book will help you through the process.
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Unread 23 Nov 2005, 13:55   #36
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

For a hobby you're right C# or Java.

But eventually if you take it further you have to learn that nasty OO stuff, that stuff sucks.
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Unread 23 Nov 2005, 22:38   #37
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

Go for the mircrosoft thing. There is alot of support for it, the express editions are free..

http://msdn.microsoft.com --> Find c# Express edition, or VB.NET Express editions.

Also check this site
http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/

imo Microsoft are doing alot recently to make the .NET 2.0 platform, it will drive windows application programming furthur, eventually.

As someone said, the world is dominated by RAD, of course it is, the world runs on money, get something done quick = more money.

Also like Kal said, they can always ask Jolt for faster servers, because it is cheaper, less headache for the developers etc etc.

C++ has it's place where it has it's place. .NET has it's place too. It all depends on what you are doing, and for coding for fun, .NET is great, check out that site.
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Unread 29 Nov 2005, 14:23   #38
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Re: What Language is the "best" to learn?

OO ürpgramming is easy. I don't think it's nasty at all.
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