Re: How's dot.net doing nowadays?

Ralph wrote:
"mayayana" <mayaXXyana1a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eCm7l4SXIHA.5340@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
C gets its look because it was designed to be minimal. ...
Maybe it was designed by and for those who hadn't learned to type yet.

I don't know whether other people will agree with
this, but I get the sense that there are really
different types of programmers.

On one end are
people with minds geared toward math, who
like terse programming languages, tend to write
low-level code, and who are fond of things like Perl.
(In a way that makes sense because such people
are often more at home with math as a language
than they are with human languages.) Those people
use C, C++, etc., and dream of some day being
hired to calculate mars mission rocket trajectories.

On the other end are people who like their code
more verbose for clarity's sake, and who enjoy the
challenge of programming in terms of abstract
thought rather than math. Those people tend to
relate more with the end product as used by a
human.

I think of the two as something like building engineers
and architects.

I needed to work a bit with C++ recently and
found it kind of fun. The case sensitivity and
semi-colons are for the birds, but the ease of
accessing memory addresses is a very interesting
strength after using VB.


I agree there are different types of programmers (who wouldn't? <g>)

But I disagree that "math-types" gravitate to C/C++. Historically, C/C++ has
actually had poor support for "math". If math was your objective one either
spent hours (if not weeks) with Knuth and the ACM hammering out libraries,
or pull out their wallet.

Was going to let this one lay but...
I agree here completely. FORTRAN (now Fortran) was the historical language for the "math" types (and still is for a significant fraction of "real" computing)...

One does find numerous articles on how to select the "Best Language" etc.
But in actual practice I have found that most programmers end up with a
language primarily because it was what was at hand at the time, or what
someone was willing to pay for. BUT they will later defend to the death that
it was their own idea all along. <g>

In my experience outside engineering organizations (and often even there) the decision was edicted by management irrespective of any technical argument. One former employer mandated C years ago. AFAIK, every piece of code from that point on had a one-line main() which called the Fortran code that did all the work. Technically, it was a C shop. :)

Then, of course, there was the DOD ADA-directive. I could enumerate many other specific examples as well as am sure others here can also...

--
.

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