What to do after Python?
Cees de Groot
cg at gaia.intranet.cdegroot.com
Sun Feb 18 15:17:25 EST 2001
Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> said:
>Actually, the problem with C is that it hides too much of the computer
>behind all that code. I spent a few years writing C on alphas, and never
>even found out how many registers the danged thing had.
Err, lots? What I meant was that C forces you to think about memory
issues, pointers, and such close-to-hardware stuff without forcing you to
to actually dive into a particular CPU (ah, those days when "register"
had measurable effects...). Much closer, and you'll indeed do assembly
(or machine code - back in the 70's I didn't have an assembler for the
C64 so I did everything in machine code inside Basic DATA statements
;-)). Probably every programmer should learn assembly as well, but then,
C programming often drives you under the hood anyway (dirty work like
picking coredumps apart).
A fun way to learn assembler is to play core wars...
>I don't suppose I could interest you in fortran?
Well, I've been following this advise of learning a language-per-year myself
for the last decade or so, and I think some dusty corner of my brains has
Fortran knowledge (dig, dig - ah: there it is. I ported PDP-11 Fortran/77 to
MS-DOS in 1986 :-)).
But since my languager-per-year adagium let me execute "learn Smalltalk"
last year, I'm an ST convert, so sorry: no interest.
--
Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD 1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B
More information about the Python-list
mailing list