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The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. [I'm a veteran of a ton of Object Pascal, btw. Do

by kabdib 13y ago

The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. [I'm a veteran of a ton of Object Pascal, btw. Done some Delphi, too -- it was nice. But.] In general, pushing a niche language as The One does not do a beginner a service. Delphi has never been more than a niche. We had a guy at Apple decide to do his project in Oberon. Super smart guy who pretty good work. He wound up getting fired because it wasn't a smart choice for the people around him who had to take over the code. I don't know why some people over-index on programming language. You use what's appropriate. If you're working alone, do whatever floats your boat. If you're on a team, using the Latest Shiny Thing or The Most Correct Safest Thing may not be the best choice. If you're a student, using your professor's favorite language (we used to call these little pet horrors PL/Prof or PROF-TRAN) outside of the course is probably a bad choice -- you want to learn what the market is, and you need to know what the weak points of your chosen language are. It's particularly poignant to see "Java only" kids come out of school who are utterly ignorant of memory models, barely know what XOR is, and who can only express themselves in terms of classes and interfaces. There's more to life than that.

Avshalom 13y ago
The problem is that unless enough people make a conscious decision otherwise the 30-40 years of C libraries/collected-knowledge means it's always "what's appropriate" even in cases where no: fortran, ada, pascal... forth/lisp/whatever-you-have-that-can-talk-to-metal would actually be more (or as) appropriate.
pjmlp 13y ago
> The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. Sure, it is all about learning for the job I guess. My rant goes into another direction actually. Young kinds nowadays tend to think that not only C is the only player on its field, it never existed nothing else before it. Whereas many of us, remember the days when C was just another systems programming languages among many others to choose from. So if they learn only C, then they get into this mentalit that bounds checkings, modules, proper vectors belongs to the realm of VM languages, while only C allow for full control. If on the other hand they learn about the Algol family of systems programming languages, besides C, they will be aware of other languages that offer the same feature set of C, compile to native code as well, while offering higher productivity. Having that knowledge will make them better C programmers as well, as they might learn a better sense of safety and disciple while coding C.

by kabdib 13y ago

Avshalom 13y ago

The problem is that unless enough people make a conscious decision otherwise the 30-40 years of C libraries/collected-knowledge means it's always "what's appropriate" even in cases where no: fortran, ada, pascal... forth/lisp/whatever-you-have-that-can-talk-to-metal would actually be more (or as) appropriate.

pjmlp 13y ago

> The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. Sure, it is all about learning for the job I guess. My rant goes into another direction actually. Young kinds nowadays tend to think that not only C is the only player on its field, it never existed nothing else before it. Whereas many of us, remember the days when C was just another systems programming languages among many others to choose from. So if they learn only C, then they get into this mentalit that bounds checkings, modules, proper vectors belongs to the realm of VM languages, while only C allow for full control. If on the other hand they learn about the Algol family of systems programming languages, besides C, they will be aware of other languages that offer the same feature set of C, compile to native code as well, while offering higher productivity. Having that knowledge will make them better C programmers as well, as they might learn a better sense of safety and disciple while coding C.