[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
“This is the fourth installment of an ongoing series
covering programming topics for the beginning programmer. If
you have been programming in a UNIX environment for a long time,
you most likely already know a great deal of this. Otherwise, read
on.”
“I received a lot of mail concerning Perl. mainly to the effect
that Perl is a great scripting language and Perl is also a great
starter language. The former is definitely true; however, it is
worth noting I sort of used “scripting language” ambiguously in the
last article. Perl is a programming language, so is Python.
Scripting vs. programming is more of a pragmatic and style issue
these days. As for the latter, right now I disagree, I believe
Python is currently the best educational language out there, if
Python did not exist, I would most likely recommend Perl as a first
language.. It is also worth noting I do not believe any one
language is the end all language, especially Python. … This is
one the really great things about Perl: its scalability. Not unlike
Python, Perl inherently scales rather well from scripting language
to all out applications language.”
“I have to confess I do not know a lot about Java. I wrote one
of the many famous calculator programs and lost interest. What I
can say about it is I am always surprised at the variety of uses
and places Java seems to be popping up and in reality has always
been since it popped up on my geek radar. Initally I thought Java
was another GUI language, the difference between it and other ones
being it has the “write-once run-anywhere” action going.”
“Definitely different languages but evolved from the same core,
C and C++ are the most widely used programming languages to date.
The reason is simple, while they may not be “write-once
run-anywhere” like Java–they came closer to it sooner than any
other programming language for its time. Especially C, which was
more or less designed to be easily ported. Another little item
about C in particular that sets it apart is it’s easy access to
hardware through small, clean interfaces. Hence why so many
systems-level programs and utilities are written in C or C++. Due
to the low to high level nature of C/C++, almost all applications
that are multiplatform are written in C/C++ (including other
languages). Last, and definitely not least, resulting executable
object code is tiny. C/C++ (again, especially C) are great for
writing small, clean and efficient programs. They are the language
of choice for device drivers, utilities, and low-level programs for
that very reason. “