Beginner needs advice

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 5:21 AM, harrismh777 <harrismh777 at charter.net> wrote:
> The problem is that they "look" similar.     :)

C looks like every other bracey language in the world. Is that a
problem? According to Wikipedia, there's quite a lot of them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_by_category#Curly-bracket_languages

I would say that the difference between the difference between Python
2 and Python 3 and the difference between C and Javascript (there,
parse THAT one without parentheses!) is that the latter have a
fundamentally different data philosophy. Both versions of Python are
the same language, because they "think" the same way; high level
objects that can be multiply-referenced, and are disposed of when no
longer needed. (That sounds like an implementation detail -
refcounting - but I don't really care how it does it under the hood,
as long as I can have multiple variables pointing to the same object,
and have objects not need explicit deallocation.) Little syntactic
differences like whether 'print' is a function or a statement, and
whether the simple slash operator between two ints returns a float,
and the fact that Unicode is the default string type, are
comparatively minor; on 'most every philosophical point, the two
dialects agree.

Chris Angelico