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From: Richard D Riehle <laoXhai@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Which language pays most 17457 -- C++ vs. Java?
Date: 1997/12/24
Message-ID: <67s1sr$f1u@dfw-ixnews11.ix.netcom.com>#1/1
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References: <199712121931.LAA25389@sirius.infonex.com>
 <67evu7$9db$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>
Organization: Netcom
X-NETCOM-Date: Wed Dec 24  4:21:15 PM CST 1997
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-12-24T16:21:15-06:00
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In article <67evu7$9db$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>,
	jeer.btrj3clfclcclcclecljpclsclpmclace@born.ph.utexas.edu (Quowong P
Liu) wrote:

>In article <199712121931.LAA25389@sirius.infonex.com>,

>Bill Gates is rich.  What language does Bill Gates like?

It really doesn't matter what language Bill Gates likes.  Gates is
first a businessman and second a technologist.  He likes BASIC and
its derivatives because that is the one technology to which he
personally made a programming contribution.  Nearly every other early
product from Microsoft, especially MS-DOS, was created by someone 
else and later resold under the Microsoft label.  Sadly, the fact that
Tim Patterson wrote MS-DOS and was tricked out of getting full credit
for his work by Microsoft is not well-known. 

As to which language is the "best" first language, the answer is,

Ada, Assembler, BASIC, C, C++, COBOL, Forth, Fortran, ML, Pascal, PL/I

or whatever language you prefer.  What is important is for the student to
understand that the first language she learns is not the only language. 
There is no best language.  One hundred years from now, none of the choices
in the above list, as currently constituted, although, as Dijkstra observed,
one of them will still be called Fortran.  More important than choice of
language for the beginning computer science student is for the professor
to instill an ecumenical view of languages.  Unfortunately, too many
computer science professors are as narrowly-based as those in industry
steeped in their own language bigotry.  

Even our current love-affair with OO technology will eventually be
supplanted by another kind of programming, if we still call it that.

One hundred years?  Yes, our colleagues in the next century will look 
upon our arguments as non-sensical and bestow upon us the same kind of
esteem we reserve for mathematicians in the time of Charlemagne.

Richard Riehle

OOPS!  Sorry, Bertrand, I did not mean to overlook Eiffel.  :-)