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Quoth · 12-26-2022, 04:42 PM

ALL programming languages are designed to make it easy to do tasks. Some are aimed a particular tasks. Like Perl is almost just I/O on RegEx scripts.
C started as a kind of machine independent Macro Assembler with more English, so as to make it easy to port UNIX.
BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was a cut down interpreted version of Fortran for Dartmouth College, ported in barely more than a week-end by Bill Gate's friend for the 8080.
Cobol was the first language for business Applications.
Fortran for mathematics and Science.
QUBAL (Queens University of Belfast Algorithmic Language) was experimental for teaching programming, based on Algol. Wirth and Hoare did it. Wirth developed more for Teaching (soley) with Jensen. Hoare did Occam for the Transputer because all existing languages were rubbish for Parallelism. Wirth then did Modula, Modula-2 (allows device drivers and parallelism) and then Oberon. Modula-2 is fundamentally different from Pascal, though it looks similar.
US DOD had Ada. A bit like Moduia-2, but deliberately wordy to be readible. Poorly written C is terrible to debug. Much easier to debug Modula-2 or Ada.
Then in 1987 I learnt C++. Unfortunately it was crippled by ease of use of C Libraries (many still have bugs) and backwards compatibility. People ignored the safe C++ strings and we still have buffer overflow in C and C++ programs.
Java was Sun's version of C++
J++ was MS version of Java, sued so became C#

Javascript and related are not much to do with Java. Client side scripting because HTML isn't a programming language.
Then a rash of hard to debug scripting languages for server side, some of which are now used for stanalone applications.

Python, C, Basic and similar are terrible languages to learn about programming. Universities in Ireland and UK used to teach programming. Now they teach a programming language. No wonder Win10 and II is worse than Window NT 3.51 or NT 4.0

GUI is now driven by fashion and clueless so called Graphic designers and has ditched loads of decent research and principles. Good programmers that learned to program can use any language in a week or two. The system APIs, libraries and frameworks take longer.

The efficiency of C was maybe true porting UNIX in 1976. It's been nonsense since the late 1980s if not earlier. C should now be banned totally for any new project. It was obsolete nearly 40 years ago.

12-26-2022, 04:42 PM	#198
Quoth Still reading Posts: 14,443 Karma: 107078855 Join Date: Jun 2017 Location: Ireland Device: All 4 Kinds: epub eink, Kindle, android eink, NxtPaper	ALL programming languages are designed to make it easy to do tasks. Some are aimed a particular tasks. Like Perl is almost just I/O on RegEx scripts. C started as a kind of machine independent Macro Assembler with more English, so as to make it easy to port UNIX. BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was a cut down interpreted version of Fortran for Dartmouth College, ported in barely more than a week-end by Bill Gate's friend for the 8080. Cobol was the first language for business Applications. Fortran for mathematics and Science. QUBAL (Queens University of Belfast Algorithmic Language) was experimental for teaching programming, based on Algol. Wirth and Hoare did it. Wirth developed more for Teaching (soley) with Jensen. Hoare did Occam for the Transputer because all existing languages were rubbish for Parallelism. Wirth then did Modula, Modula-2 (allows device drivers and parallelism) and then Oberon. Modula-2 is fundamentally different from Pascal, though it looks similar. US DOD had Ada. A bit like Moduia-2, but deliberately wordy to be readible. Poorly written C is terrible to debug. Much easier to debug Modula-2 or Ada. Then in 1987 I learnt C++. Unfortunately it was crippled by ease of use of C Libraries (many still have bugs) and backwards compatibility. People ignored the safe C++ strings and we still have buffer overflow in C and C++ programs. Java was Sun's version of C++ J++ was MS version of Java, sued so became C# Javascript and related are not much to do with Java. Client side scripting because HTML isn't a programming language. Then a rash of hard to debug scripting languages for server side, some of which are now used for stanalone applications. Python, C, Basic and similar are terrible languages to learn about programming. Universities in Ireland and UK used to teach programming. Now they teach a programming language. No wonder Win10 and II is worse than Window NT 3.51 or NT 4.0 GUI is now driven by fashion and clueless so called Graphic designers and has ditched loads of decent research and principles. Good programmers that learned to program can use any language in a week or two. The system APIs, libraries and frameworks take longer. The efficiency of C was maybe true porting UNIX in 1976. It's been nonsense since the late 1980s if not earlier. C should now be banned totally for any new project. It was obsolete nearly 40 years ago.