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lau
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15 Jan 2012, 7:24 pm

klausnrooster wrote:
I've been doing excel VBA for years and have been looking at other languages for 10 years. It's fun shopping around. Try a bunch of 'em. I keep coming back to Factor. I played with Forth and if I wanted to do low-level or embedded coding I'd go Forth. But Factor is more for me - high level and nice help system, etc... The compelling reasons for Factor or another concatenative language are in a concatenative dot org page. I can't post link since this is my first ever post.

Most people have never heard of Forth.

Although I've never done anything that significant in the language (other that writing compiler/interpreters for it!), I've always been a bit of a fan. It has a closeness to machine code that means it can be almost as fast as pure assembler, plus a high-level aspect that means it can be very much more compact than a program written in machine code.

Sadly, the modern paradigm seems to be to have ridiculously fast processors (to cope with rubbish languages) and vast amounts of memory (to cope with rubbish languages).


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klausnrooster
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15 Jan 2012, 7:33 pm

@lau,

It's sad isn't it? I have colorforth on a floppy and I can use it on 1980's early Panasonic Toughbook with no hard drive. NO OS needed. That is very cool. Anybody who wants to play with Forth can get Ficl. Ficl comes with a nice little console. You have a big Forth shop on your side of the pond, no? MPForth? Nope, sorry. Edit: MPEForth!



lau
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15 Jan 2012, 7:48 pm

klausnrooster wrote:
@lau,

It's sad isn't it? I have colorforth on a floppy and I can use it on 1980's early Panasonic Toughbook with no hard drive. NO OS needed. That is very cool. Anybody who wants to play with Forth can get Ficl. Ficl comes with a nice little console. You have a big Forth shop on your side of the pond, no? MPForth? Nope, sorry. Edit: MPEForth!

Weird.

Forth is a language that's too close to machine code for people to be bothered to learn

Forth is a language that's too high a level for people to understand.


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klausnrooster
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15 Jan 2012, 8:06 pm

Yes to all 3.



lau
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15 Jan 2012, 9:20 pm

klausnrooster wrote:
Yes to all 3.
:)


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Exaleadien
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16 Jan 2012, 7:08 am

Hi all !

Thanks klausnrooster for your point of view and your links ;-) And thanks to the recent others as well (Recycler, scubasteve, Ichinin, Birbal, bryce13950, Titangeek...)

This is the kind of topic I really enjoy reading, as posters interact with each others.

As I've explained on the first page (my background & my goals), I will plan several projects :

one short term (2-3 months time) with JavaScript and PHP (as it is my daily routine as a webmaster, but I need to gain mastering of), plus XML/XSLT
one medium term (4-5 months) Python|Ruby, Pascal|Delphi (to write softwares that can handle http tasks on a client-side storage way)
one long term (from a year to a life span - well, what remains for mine anyway -) : C|C++, Forth, ASM (to understand as much as possible how it works !)

Also : Lisp, Fortran, Ada, Cobol ... to understand how they differ and to try to have a grasp of the wide scope of computer programming, just as speaking many languages can help someone in its vision of life, himself and the world ;-)

Anything in my 3 terms that seems inacurrate/inapropriate to you ?

Thanks for debating/contributing !



Recycler
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16 Jan 2012, 10:22 am

lau wrote:
Sadly, the modern paradigm seems to be to have ridiculously fast processors (to cope with rubbish languages) and vast amounts of memory (to cope with rubbish languages).


Agree...very sad :(

Exaleadien: looks good :) PHP/JS and web languages in general are good to earn some money (in my region, small companies always want PHP backends :D). As it happens, I participate in a startup, working on a Ruby on Rails backend, which seems to be quite modern ([ad]orderpass com[/ad]). Your long term plans: great!

For anybody who is interested in C++, I strongly recommend watching these:
channel9.msdn com/posts/C-and-Beyond-2011-Herb-Sutter-Why-C
channel9.msdn com/posts/Scott-Meyers-Andrei-Alexandrescu-and-Herb-Sutter-C-and-Beyond

(forum doesn't let me post URLs yet, sorry)

// edit: oops, corrected quote


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Last edited by Recycler on 17 Jan 2012, 1:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

klausnrooster
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16 Jan 2012, 8:43 pm

That quote is lau's by the way. To the OP, "Learn 2 or more languages" is more useful advice than "learn language xyz". Nothing at all wrong with your list! I still can not post links, see
acheteeteepee slash slash concatenative dot org slash wiki slash view slash Concatenative language
for the Fundamentals, .. idioms, and ... interesting properties links on that page. Nevermind selling the concat langs, these are interesting reading for perspective on any lang.



fraac
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19 Jan 2012, 5:25 pm

FriendlyHougen
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22 Jan 2012, 10:17 am

C++ is the best in my opinion, since it makes video games.



raykusray
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02 Feb 2012, 9:27 am

Huh. Isn't Mind.Forth written in forth code?
Anyways, I'd go with learning some C programming basics, and then Java basics. After that, any language is fair game.



monkeykoder
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09 Feb 2012, 11:24 pm

I've studied Visual Basic (5.0 days) C, C++, C#, and Atmel assembly language (the Arduino system is based on an Atmel chip) and played with SCHEME, Python, Perl, PHP, Javascript, and a few others. From my perspective Perl is definitely a no-no for a first language frankly the prettiest Perl code in the world would beat out the nastiest example from the OCCC. SCHEME is just plain fun though I don't think I'd ever write anything useful in it. PHP is very functional and gets things done it has it's own beauty. Javascript well it's a scripting language pure and simple you'll never do anything other than web-pages in it but if you do web work no matter what you'll end up using it or one of it's front ends. C, C++ are your race cars of the programming world they're incredibly powerful and fast but you darned well better know what you're doing.

C# (I've used it mainly in an ASP.NET perspective) is a wonderful language for rapid development but gives you nearly no access to what is under the hood in a way this is a good thing it makes you focus on code not details as someone that tends to get stuck in details it has greatly increased my understanding of the actual act of programming. Then we get to Python it's a lot like C# in that it has almost everything you need available to you but if you really want to you can still get pretty darned close to the nitty gritty details and actually make things happen (possibly those things that "shouldn't" happen). Each language has it's use but unless you're coding business applications I would stay away from C#.



esh
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16 Feb 2012, 10:41 am

I suggest starting with Python and continuing with C++



Lynners
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19 Feb 2012, 12:51 am

The programming requirements in my program are basic, java, and C++.



ruveyn
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19 Feb 2012, 8:37 am

For quick and dirty scripts you can't beat PERL. It is one of the wittiest programming languages ever invented.

ruveyn



monkeykoder
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19 Feb 2012, 12:10 pm

ruveyn wrote:
For quick and dirty scripts you can't beat PERL. It is one of the wittiest programming languages ever invented.

ruveyn


Once Python came around one really can't recommend PERL over Python they have the same properties Python is just cleaner.