C++Talk.NET

Guest · Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 9:10 am Post subject: Learning to program

Hi

I hope that I am posting to the right place. I want to learn
programming and am looking at a language too choose. I thought about
C++ but my friend told me thats its old fashioned and will be replaced
by more modern computer languages like Visual Basic and Cold Fusion.

Is it true that not many people use C++ anymore? What is the best
language to learn?

Stefan Rickfjord · Guest

Hi there,

your friend's comment depend on what you want to do. When creating a
big application which has high demands on effective resource management
(i.e. database implementations, CAD-applications or other
calculation-intensive applications) you more or less have to use an
effective language. C/C++ are still among the most widely used in these
applications due to their extremely fast and effective compiled
binaries.

Languages like VB.Net are easy to use and provide a lot of
functionalities that aid the programmer such as memory management but
these languages are not effective enough when making the kinds of
applications I described in the above section.

When considering operating system, you simply can't use an interpreted
language like .NET or Java because they require a virtual computer to
interpret the Java/.Net bytecode created by the compilers in these
languages.

So, my tip to you is actually to begin with C++, maybe C and learn
this. This is probably the biggest threshold to get over. When you are
familiar with these languages, you won't have any problems at all
learning any other (similar) language like VB et.c. By similar I mean
no other imperative and / or objective-oriented language.

C/C++ has features called pointers that are extremely effective, but
also quite dangerous to use if not used properly. They don't exist in
Java/.Net so I believe it's better to start with the hard stuff than to
later on discover that there is a lot of features that you don't know
how to use.

So, if you don't have an unlimited amount of time think about what you
want to do when programming, web-stuff, applications for operating
systems or low level, hardware-controlling applications for operating
systems? Each of these (more or less) should give you a different set
of tools you'd want to use. If you do have an unlimited amount of time,
go for it, learn the basics in C/C++ and just keep on going...

I hope this helped somewhat

Best regards,
Stefan Rickfjord
M.Sc. Software Engineer
master_program...@outgun.com wrote:

Jerry Coffin · Guest

In article <pan.2006.08.17.18.05.04.528282 (AT) all (DOT) com>, noone (AT) all (DOT) com
says...

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