Re: new programmer wondering what to learn

[mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner)]

Replying to the four Peter Hermann questions

1. Which languages would be best for general real world use?
   If you are going to program in languages, we must recognize that the
   current traditional religions of computer science are the languages
   beginning with the letter C, like C, C++, Cobol, and the C++ derivative
   Java. However, the languages that are most useful for solving problems
   in descending order of usefulness are SQL, Ada-95, awk, perl, htlm,
   cgi, and rtf.

   You will be a heritic if you solve database problems in SQL instead of
   Cobol and C++, but you will cost your customer less money, both
   up front and over the life cycle of the project. You will similarly
   be a heretic if you do your probablistic pattern recognition, data
   mining, and intelligent applications in Ada-95 instead of C++ and Java,
   but your code will have fewer bugs, be easier to maintain, and will be
   easier to connect to existing C, C++, Java, Ada-95, CORBA, Net, and 
   extremely complex data structures, resulting in a life-cycle cost
   reduction over the dominant religions.

   However, your question is predicated on an assumption that it takes
   a long time to learn to be basically useful in a new language, which
   is not true. Try to do an extremely complex data structure in each
   of the languages before specializing in any of them.

2. Is it worth my while to learn Ada?
   Since Ada-95 includes configuration management, life-cycle maintenance
   reduction, bug-catching, parallel processing, and software reliability
   features not present in other languages, and since it is relatively
   easy to connect Ada-95 code to existing code in many other languages,
   YES, it is worth your while to learn Ada.

3. Which langauges would be best to learn for database building?
   SQL.

4. Which languages would be best for graphics, i.e. video game programming.
   All programs that ever will be written have already been written, except
   for video games. The language which makes it easiest to integrate
   together efficient code in the language itself, downloaded Free code,
   and pieces of code in many other languages is Ada-95. Combined with
   the code reliability of finding more bugs at compile time than the
   other commonly used languages, there is a significant advantage for
   writing a video game in Ada-95. There is free code available for the
   commonly used device drivers, and tasking and protected records give
   you a reliable, interesting method of controlling concurrency. Advice
   on the most efficient way to implement various video game features is
   a speciality of this list. For example, have you tried to implement
   sprite graphics on a VGA 16-color mode by using each of the 4 planes
   as a sprite plane, in a color determined by the palette? How fast can
   you scroll a VGA screen? How can you uncook the keyboard so keystrokes
   are recognized immediately? How can you make the keyboard into an 
   organ so you can play multiple keys at the same time? This list will
   either answer your questions or point you to people who can. If your
   video game is going to be Free software, there are people on this
   list who may be willing to contribute time to helping develop it.