Pythons & Ladders

[castironpi at gmail.com]

On Feb 28, 1:10 am, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <bj_... at gmx.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:18:27 -0800, Jeff Schwab wrote:
> > Benoit wrote:
> >> I've been teaching myself the python language over the past few months
> >> using Mark Lutz' Learning Python, 3ed.  Python is also the first
> >> programming language I've ever taken up.  I find the language easy to
> >> learn and rather productive in relation to the introductory course on C
> >> ++ I'd begun in January for fun @ school (we're practicing dynamic
> >> arrays using pointers... kill me now).
>
> > Get a better teacher, if you can.  Please do me a personal favor:  Don't
> > hold the crappy course against C++.  For the record, you should never
> > have to manage dynamically allocated arrays manually, nor store pointers
> > to them.  Try the std::vector template, and post in comp.lang.c++ if
> > have any trouble.
>
> Hey a flame bait.  I'll bite.  This a bit of an overreaction unless you
> know what the course was about.  If the goal is to learn about the
> computer and that basically everything is a number in the end, then C is a
> good choice.  More portable than assembler but nearly as close to the
> metal.
>
> To the OP: If you try C++, don't hold that crappy language against C#, D,
> or Java.  ;-)
>
> Ciao,
>         Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

Welcome!  This is the self-proclaimed 'impossible and useless' guy.
Since you're in to TMLs, try escaping a text file with a small subset
of characters, so that it's readable with a browser.  Say by replacing
all the ampersands with &, the line breaks with <p>, and maybe
even a 'list' with <li>s.  (That went easy, moderate, hard.)  Then,
for impossible, do it without (I repeat, WITHOUT) reading the whole
file into memory, say only 32 characters at a time.

Sadly, even at teenages, specializations you make affect your
specializations later.  There's no best specialization priority, and $$
$ned if I'm picking yours.  Mine gets me here; that's all I can know.
Electives or bust!

Anyway, Marc is right.  Python teaches you a lot about programming,
but C teaches you a lot about computers.  More generally, you can
write in one line in one language what takes hundreds in another, but
in one line in that one what's impossible in the first.  It's -your- -
day-; "allegretto: meter's running".