[sdiy] Programming Language Recommendation

[Michael E Caloroso]

Error messages... don't get me started.

My major beef with most object oriented languages are error messages
ranging from very misleading to completely useless.  It is infuriating
to translate those things!  And Judas Priest MS Visual Studio has WAY
too many options for their IDE - too many times I have seen a build
fail because of an obscure IDE setting.

I REALLY dislike Python.  It suffers from inconsistent library
conventions, unreliable online references, the use of whitespace for
sectioning code is hard on the eyes, and it is NOT 100% portable.  I
have found changing to a new version of Python resulted in errors due
to certain library methods that were renamed!  No two Pythons
compilers are the same, one version would execute without error while
the target machine disliked the mixed use of tab/space whitespace for
code sections.  We tracked down a nasty bug back to a function call
that was misspelled with the leading character in the function name
not capitalized, yet the program kept running along merrily.

Give me mid-level languages like C any day.  You get non-cryptic error
messages that are solved quickly and the language has been cast in
stone since the 1980s.

MC

On 12/7/20, Richie Burnett <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk> wrote:
> Assembly is my favourite language hands down.  Been doing it professionally
> for almost 30 years.  Just recently started trying to learn a bit of C, but
> finding it *much* harder than I imagined the transition and learning curve
> would be.  At the moment embedded C seems very much like assembly language
> except just sufficiently different to trip me up and ruin my flow with
> endless cryptic error messages that I struggle to understand!
>
> -Richie,
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jean-Pierre Desrochers
> Sent: Monday, December 7, 2020 4:57 PM
> To: 'Michael E Caloroso' ; 'Roman Sowa'
> Cc: synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] Programming Language Recommendation
>
>> C is still my favorite language.
> Same for me !
>
> JP
>
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org] De la part de
> Michael E Caloroso
> Envoyé : 7 décembre 2020 11:29
> À : Roman Sowa
> Cc : synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> Objet : Re: [sdiy] Programming Language Recommendation
>
> I'm a BTEE graduate, one of my classes was structured programming.
> Language was Pascal.  We were given an assignment to build a program that
> converted resistor color codes to actual value.  To my instructor's
> disbelief I designed a converter using three lines of code.  I simply made a
> string array with the color codes in order, and used the array index as the
> digit value & multiplier.  Thus the color code could be parsed and value
> computed in a single line.  Even without any formal programming education I
> already understood the concept of indirect array indexing and compound
> statements.
>
> That intuition helped when I studied microprocessors and assembly language.
>
> I have to say that assembly programming did make it easier to learn C.
>
> C is still my favorite language.
>
> MC
>
> On 12/7/20, Roman Sowa <modular at go2.pl> wrote:
>>
>> W dniu 2020-12-05 o 22:11, Brian Willoughby pisze:
>>> You definitely won't be wasting your time by learning C.
>>>
>>
>> That one sentence brought my attention.
>> It took me a whole semester in school to understand one line of
>> simplest code in C, but after that it was a path with no return. I
>> only had background in Assembler and Pascal before. As a result my
>> master's thesis was rather complex Windows program written in C++ with
>> small addition of hardware. And I was not educated to be a programmer at
>> all.
>>
>> What I mean to say is that learning C is like riding a bike, it may be
>> a bit tough at first, after you learn it you don't have to use it each
>> day to jump on it one day and just go ahead.
>> Now C is my first choice when I need simple PC utilities, like file
>> format converters.
>>
>> Roman
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