[ILUG] Which language?

[Smelly Pooh]

In reply to Brady, Padraig's flatulent wordings, 
> In summary if you want to make more money/be more marketable
> learn java. If you would like to be able to implement solutions
> more quickly and easily choose perl. (This depends on what you
> want to implement of course). Note this sounds like a Perl 
> advocacy rant, it's not. More comments below:

nah it doesn't, there's plenty of stuff that PERLs a great quickie for,
although personally I find the language too ugly and kludgey for anything over
a few hundred lines.

> True Java has now surpassed (in the UK anyway) C++ in
> frequency in job advertisements. Note MS technologies like
> VB, MFC etc. are falling away quite quickly in popularity.
> The same thing is happening in the US.

Perhaps that'll explain this wonderfully new and revolutionary language they
call C#

> > C and C++ are very powerful and can give much greater performance and
> > scalability on _large_ systems, but they come at the price of 
> > making it easy to mess up big time.
> 
> I agree. In general the more flexible something is, necessarily
> the more complex it is. In other words there is no free lunch.

Not necessarily, look at the RISC vs. CISC debates, even in language terms the
most simplistic are the most flexible.  Scheme is a good example, good for all
levels of programming, scripting and embedding, extendable via user written
macros to include object orientation, loop structures, exception handling and
so on, with a more complex language aforementioned infrastructure might
already be there, but it'd be a lot harder to adapt the language to new ideas
as readily as with a simple language like Scheme.

I'll concede that you might be using the word flexibility to describe such
things as being able to handle memory yourself, access low level stuff like
kernel APIs or inline assembly and so forth, although I consider that control
not flexibility.

> Languages that are not procedureal or object oriented will
> be even harder to learn (even if they're @ the same level),
> as you will need to change your thought processes to implement
> the solution. For e.g. functional languages. A good list
> of language types is @ http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/

Quite true, it's often said that people who began on imperative languages have
a harder time learning functional languages than people who have never touched
programming.  A worrying pattern is the way most popular languages of late are
syntatical (and mostly semantical) ripoffs of C, I wonder if people will ever
break that mold