C running strong

[jacob navia]

Programming languages come and go. Still is amazing that in this survey
from
http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,2016936,00.asp
the C language comes second, right after Java.

Java
# What it is: An object-oriented programming language developed by James
Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s.
# Job availabilities: 14,408

C
# What it is: A standardized, general-purpose programming language, it's
one of the most pervasive languages and the basis for several others
(such as C++).
# Job availabilities: 6,164, including all derivatives

C#
# What it is: A general-purpose, compiled, object-oriented programming
language developed by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative, it
evolved from C and C++
# Job availabilities: 5,111

Perl
# What it is: Perl is an open-source, cross-platform, server-side
interpretive programming language used extensively to process text
through CGI programs.
# Job availabilities: 4,810

JavaScript
# What it is: Not to be confused with Java, JavaScript is a an
object-oriented, scripting programming language that runs in the Web
browser on the client side. It's smaller than Java, with a simplified
set of commands, easier to code and doesn't have to be compiled.
# Job availabilities: 4,406

VB.Net (Visual Basic .Net)
# What it is: An object-oriented language implemented on Microsoft's
..Net framework.
# Job availabilities: 2,090

PHP
# What it is: An open-source, interpretive, server-side, cross-platform,
HTML scripting language, especially well-suited for Web development as
it can be embedded into HTML pages.
# Job availabilities: 1,152*

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
# What it is: Though technically not a programming language, AJAX uses
XHTML or HTML, JavaScript and XML to create interactive Web applications.
# Job availabilities : 1,106

Ruby and Ruby on Rails
# What they are: Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented, open-source
programming language; Ruby on Rails is an open-source Web application
framework written in Ruby that closely follows the MVC
(Model-View-Controller) architecture.
# Job availabilities : 210 and 54, respectively

Python
# What it is: An interpreted, dynamically object-oriented, open-source
programming language that utilizes automatic memory management.
# Job availabilities: 811

* All numbers on job availability were pulled from nationwide queries on
Dice.com, a job site for technology professionals.

[Charlton Wilbur]

>>>>"BB" == Ben Bacarisse <be********@bsb .me.ukwrites:

BB(1) No module system so you can't provide a package to learn
BBwith. Even a quasi module system like #include "graphics.h "
BBallows students to start writing interesting program from day
BBone.

One of the design goals of Pascal was that a Pascal file could be
compiled on its own in one pass. Allowing packages breaks this. This
is because Pascal is *also* useful in teaching compiler construction.

Many of the commercially available Pascals for microcomputers (I
remember in particular Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS and Think Pascal and
MPW for Macintoshes) included an extension to work around this.

Charlton
--
Charlton Wilbur
cw*****@chromat ico.net

[Spiros Bousbouras]

james of tucson wrote:

David T. Ashley wrote:

Gosh, I don't see any market for Pascal programmers! ... All that time
wasted in computer science classes.

I know of quite a few commercial projects that were developed in Delphi,
so I imagine there is some.

Isn't Dephi a separate language derived from Pascal ?

[Ben Bacarisse]

CBFalconer <cb********@yah oo.comwrites:

Ben Bacarisse wrote:

>Richard Heathfield <rj*@see.sig.in validwrites:

... snip ...

>>>
Pascal is a superb teaching language. That it is not widely used
in industry does not change this fact.

Since so many regulars are posting OT about Pascal these days, I
beg leave to join in...

I have used Pascal to teach programming and it is not up to the
task. Lots of little details that could have been finessed in a
teaching language were not (the IO system comes to mind) but the
two biggest problems are:

That's because you don't understand it.

If you say so.

The file system is very
flexible, and can handle almost anything if you write a suitable
driver (in something other than Pascal).

What an extraordinary idea. I am not alone in this view of Pascal's
IO system, and if you think it is simply my ignorance and/or the fact
that I did not write a suitable driver, I won't try to persuade
otherwise. Brian Kernighan has written an excellent critique of
Pascal which explains, far better than I can, some of the "little
details" I was referring to.

Don't forget that the
file can be a "FILE OF <RECORD>", and that the f^ will be an
instance of that record.

How could I forget such a thing?

Of course if you use crippled non-Pascal
systems, such as Turbo, you never get to see or use these
abilities.

That would be daft.

<snip>

The other major criticism has been the lack of separate compilation
in ISO7185. ISO10206 (Extended Pascal) handles this more than
adequately and is downward compatible. ISO10206 has been available
since 1986, 1984 for drafts.

There are lots of extensions that address this problem. I can see a
huge OT thread growing if we start to get into what "Pascal" is, but I
take it to mean ISO 7185. You are free to take it to mean Extended
Pascal. I would have posted a different response if Extended Pascal
had been claimed to be a superb teaching language.

--
Ben.

[CBFalconer]

Spiros Bousbouras wrote:

james of tucson wrote:

>David T. Ashley wrote:

>>Gosh, I don't see any market for Pascal programmers! ... All
that time wasted in computer science classes.

I know of quite a few commercial projects that were developed in
Delphi, so I imagine there is some.

Isn't Dephi a separate language derived from Pascal ?

It certainly isn't Pascal. It omits far too much of the
essentials. I don't know if the worst of those omissions can still
be fixed with my txtfiles unit for Turbo. See:

<http://cbfalconer.home .att.net/download/>

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home .att.net>

[CBFalconer]

Ben Bacarisse wrote:

>

.... snip ...

>
What an extraordinary idea. I am not alone in this view of Pascal's
IO system, and if you think it is simply my ignorance and/or the fact
that I did not write a suitable driver, I won't try to persuade
otherwise. Brian Kernighan has written an excellent critique of
Pascal which explains, far better than I can, some of the "little
details" I was referring to.

While BK is highly respected in general, his critique is from the
point of view of someone trying to replace C, and he didn't really
understand the language either. Better than most, though. IIRC he
also wasn't aware of lazyio.

For interactive use the only major criticism is the fact that read
will abort on faulty input. This was fixed in Pascalp by providing
a set of readx[int, etc] that returned an error indicator. Those
can be built within ISO7185 without difficulty, but cannot be
integrated into the pseudo variadic read function without diddling
the compiler and making it non-compliant.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home .att.net>

[Richard Bos]

Ben Bacarisse <be********@bsb .me.ukwrote:

CBFalconer <cb********@yah oo.comwrites:

The other major criticism has been the lack of separate compilation
in ISO7185. ISO10206 (Extended Pascal) handles this more than
adequately and is downward compatible. ISO10206 has been available
since 1986, 1984 for drafts.

There are lots of extensions that address this problem. I can see a
huge OT thread growing if we start to get into what "Pascal" is, but I
take it to mean ISO 7185. You are free to take it to mean Extended
Pascal. I would have posted a different response if Extended Pascal
had been claimed to be a superb teaching language.

So would I: I would have said that it has many of the same problems C
has for teaching (and few of its advantages for actual use).

Richard