4 ms·
Another worthy pursuit: buy all of Brian Kernighan's books, not just The C Programming Language. It is well worth the pain of becoming slightly familiar with Fo
by angrycoder 16y ago
Another worthy pursuit: buy all of Brian Kernighan's books, not just The C Programming Language. It is well worth the pain of becoming slightly familiar with Fortran and Pascal to read these little gems.
Being familiar with how things work is undoubtedly useful, but I argue if you are an application developer, learning software construction is equally if not more important.
See also: Code Complete, Programming Pearls, and C interfaces and implementations.
- spitfire 16y agoI never knew Kernighan wrote a pascal book. (or a version of a book in pascal). Neat. Also ampl seems quire useful, I've written my own versions of some of that stuff in mathematica. It'd be great to have it already done for me.
- angrycoder 16y agoSoftware Tools in Pascal. There was a previous version with examples written in something called Ratfor, which from what I've read is a hybrid of fortran and C. http://www.amazon.com/Software-Tools-Pascal-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0201103427/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1298360333&sr=8-6 http://www.amazon.com/Software-Tools-Pascal-Brian-Kernighan/...
- cema 16y agoRatfor, if my memory serves me well, was a set of macros which sort of turned Fortran into a simplified C. Better read the Pascal book, the language (Pascal) would be easier to follow.
- torpor 16y agoSee also: Deep C Secrets
- timthorn 16y agoWhy imply that there's pain in becoming familiar with Fortran or Pascal? It's one thing to argue that they may not be the best tool to build a web app with, but I'd argue there's a joy in learning about alternative languages.
- pmjordan 16y agoYou haven't actually used Fortran, have you? It's okay for demonstrating short snippets of code, but actually writing Fortran programs is pretty awful if you're used to modern languages. It's like the syntax of BASIC combined with the safety of assembly language.
- timthorn 16y agoNot in anger, no - but that's my point: there's an intellectual pleasure in learning about it, even if there may be pain when trying to write a full application.
- psykotic 16y ago> You haven't actually used Fortran, have you? It's okay for demonstrating short snippets of code, but actually writing Fortran programs is pretty awful if you're used to modern languages. It's like the syntax of BASIC combined with the safety of assembly language. Please look at the feature set of Fortran 2008 and say that again with a straight face.
- pmjordan 16y agoPossibly. The last versions I used were Fortran 90 and 95, which were quite frankly an insult to the 40 or so years of programming language design research and practice leading up to it.
- psykotic 16y agoThe same could be said and has been said for C++ as an evolution of pre-ANSI C. A radical blank-slate language like Fortress is by its nature different from a conservative but still significant extension like Fortran 2008. Both efforts seek to advance the state of the art in the same field but from different directions.
- fanf2 16y agoThe "F programming language" subset of Fortran 95 is rather nice, except for the bizarre omission of the while loop.