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This article is great, and I totally agree with it. Introductory cs course are far to easy. Im glad my school at least forced you to learn C on top of Java and offered a course in Scheme, which I took, but most people dont because it is too hard. Far to many times I have had to work with people in 3rd and 4th year course that just dont know how to program properly and should not be in cs. I found out recently my school is actually switching its first cs course to python instead of java because it is easier to learn for newbies....
On April 19 2009 12:50 Not_Computer wrote:
I have a friend who is also looking to learn a programming language during the summer and he asked me what to learn... I suggested him C and C++ as a lot of you guys did, though I also suggested Python, he suggested Java, and a friend suggested C#.
In your opinion, what is the best compiler (per language) to use when learning?
I can google some but I wanna hear what TL thinks.
edit: also, are there any downloadable programming textbooks? (or simple, thorough learning guides)
For Java use Eclipse. It is a great IDE. I think you can also use it for C/C++, but I never have. I did all my C/C++ programming using text editors and the gcc/g++ compilers on solaris and linux machines which can be extremely frustrating at times.
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United States3824 Posts
We program in my CS program (my school clumps classes into programs) using Java and talk extensively about recursion. And maybe we don't have goto in java but we are well aware of what recursion is and are expected to implement it most of the time (except in the HW I just turned in  )
If you want to say that Java is causing Universities to stop teaching students certain programing concepts then I would blame your school. The concepts stay the same across the languages.
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Hmm right now i am in a software development company as an intern, and i think it isnt really what language you learn, as different languages have different support in different areas. DirectX is a very common game programming abstraction level, and only really works with C++. I used it with DirectX 9. Havent really tried with Java, but some simple console stuff that is considered normal in C++/C# is quite tedious with Java, but has a lot of libraries to handle stuff. and handling XML with JAVA is just a PAIN in the ass, unlike other scripting languages like PHP which handles XML like a charm. I considered C# to be a better equivalent of VB, which allows me to write GUI apps quickly and easily with the power of C++. Eclipse is good, I tried with notepad and it totally sucks balls
Btw, to the people in the know, downloading the free Visual C++ Express or Visual C# or the all-in-one Visual Studios, which is the best option? I could easily forsee myself using both languages.
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On April 19 2009 13:10 FreeZEternal wrote:
no fucking way, start with c++? C++ is a fucked up language. Go for C if you wanna learn pointer arithmetic and other interesting stuff. Then choose an OOP language that's not C++ lol.
Missing out on vector, string, and boost library for no real benefit is more fucked i would say.
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Learning C or C++ gives lets you learn the basics and gives you a strong base to expand your programming upon. After learning ways to solve problems, the language doesn't really matter, it's just different syntax with some differences, but after you learn how to actually solve problems, which is the hard part, languages aren't much of a barrier.
Also, Java was written in C, so think about that.
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On April 19 2009 16:04 gzealot wrote:
Hmm right now i am in a software development company as an intern, and i think it isnt really what language you learn, as different languages have different support in different areas. DirectX is a very common game programming abstraction level, and only really works with C++. I used it with DirectX 9. Havent really tried with Java, but some simple console stuff that is considered normal in C++/C# is quite tedious with Java, but has a lot of libraries to handle stuff. and handling XML with JAVA is just a PAIN in the ass, unlike other scripting languages like PHP which handles XML like a charm. I considered C# to be a better equivalent of VB, which allows me to write GUI apps quickly and easily with the power of C++. Eclipse is good, I tried with notepad and it totally sucks balls
Btw, to the people in the know, downloading the free Visual C++ Express or Visual C# or the all-in-one Visual Studios, which is the best option? I could easily forsee myself using both languages.
yeap pre JDK 5 handling console stuff can be a pain in the ass. With JDK 5 and up, you can just use the Scanner class to read input from the console. Eclipse is good, NetBeans is good as well. For .NET, nothing beats Visual Studio +_+
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On April 19 2009 11:35 Osmoses wrote:
Whereas Java and C# are easy, convenient and powerful, C/C++ is still the best for performance. In other words, different jobs requires different languages. You don't do game programming in Java, and you don't program microchips in C. That's why some universities still teach perl and cobalt, etc.
How wrong can you be? You definitely program microchips in C and Java is definitely used to make games.
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On April 21 2009 00:33 yenta wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2009 11:35 Osmoses wrote:
Whereas Java and C# are easy, convenient and powerful, C/C++ is still the best for performance. In other words, different jobs requires different languages. You don't do game programming in Java, and you don't program microchips in C. That's why some universities still teach perl and cobalt, etc. How wrong can you be? You definitely program microchips in C and Java is definitely used to make games.
While you can program microchips in C, it is not the best way to go because of the lack of memory. While you can program games in java, you shouldn't, because the automatic garbage collector among other things slows down performance.
Mind you I've never even tried programming microchips in anything but assembler, I'm just regurgitating the answer I got from my professor when I asked about it. I also have not programmed any high-tech games in java, again I'm just telling you what I was told by people who ought to know better, some of which ran a game programming college.
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On April 21 2009 00:33 yenta wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2009 11:35 Osmoses wrote:
Whereas Java and C# are easy, convenient and powerful, C/C++ is still the best for performance. In other words, different jobs requires different languages. You don't do game programming in Java, and you don't program microchips in C. That's why some universities still teach perl and cobalt, etc. How wrong can you be? You definitely program microchips in C and Java is definitely used to make games.
For majority of games most people are talking AAA development studios, which you surely wouldn't want to use Java for (yet). C++ has too many tools and tons of libraries that are just there for games.
Also joelonsoftware is one of my fav sites.
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C++ and using VIsual studios 2008. And yes, visual studios is probably one of the better IDE's don't listen to everybody blasting VS 
Java is a good language ( i guess) but don't use NetBeans! it's a blasted IDE...
C# is a good language too. But i would much rather program using C++/CLI with .NET than use C#.
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EPT
