Easiest programming langauage you've ever learned?

[calpha]

I guess I should qualify this as non-scripting languages....since most of them are purty easy.,....
[edit]
And by easiest...>I mean the one where you were able to pick it up the quickest......and be productive. In my case---Java (especially w/ Swing) would rank last followed by MFC programming. VB would rank a close 2nd to what I'm learning right now....Delphi
[/edit]

x86 Assembly for me

YAH RIGHT

Anyway---been doing MFC programming for the past two weeks non stop and my eyes are crossing, so I just picked up my personal edition of Delphi 7 and started hacking away.

I think it's the easiest IDE/Language I've ever used as far as not knowing any syntax, and being able to figure stuff out w/o even looking at the online help.

VB is close----and the online help for it is better IMO----but Delphi sure seems powerful as hell. and multi threaded at that. Wonder why there's not more Delphi coded custom apps as oppossed to VB....it sure ranks right up there with ease of use IMO.

 

[DaveSimmons]

They get easier the more you learn -- I started with dialects of Basic, then 6502 assembly. In college 8080 and 8086 assembly were pretty easy knowing 6502, and Pascal was easy since the concepts of loops, arrays, etc. are the same as in Basic. Knowing Pascal made moving to C/C++ easy since the only new thing was classes.

In short, the first one might be hard, the later ones in the same category (assembly, procedural, etc.) are easy. The only ones that are hard then are really new ones (functional like ML, stack-oriented like Forth, logic-oriented like Prolog).

 

[Spyro]

Java by far, even though I'm not quite as proficient using it as I'd like to be :\

 

[ViRaLRuSh]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
They get easier the more you learn -- I started with dialects of Basic, then 6502 assembly. In college 8080 and 8086 assembly were pretty easy knowing 6502, and Pascal was easy since the concepts of loops, arrays, etc. are the same as in Basic. Knowing Pascal made moving to C/C++ easy since the only new thing was classes.

In short, the first one might be hard, the later ones in the same category (assembly, procedural, etc.) are easy. The only ones that are hard then are really new ones (functional like ML, stack-oriented like Forth, logic-oriented like Prolog).

Hardest language ever, for me, LISP.

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: calpha

VB is close----and the online help for it is better IMO----but Delphi sure seems powerful as hell. and multi threaded at that. Wonder why there's not more Delphi coded custom apps as oppossed to VB....it sure ranks right up there with ease of use IMO.

There are. If you really look into it Delphi/C++ Builder is used in tons of popular Win32 shareware apps, possibly even a majority of that sector.

The key there is _shareware_ apps, typically written by an individual. Large companies are afraid to use any non-M$ written development environment when coding for Win32.

P.S. If you are doing more than trivial applications, I would say Delphi beats VB for ease of use, hands down.

 

[calpha]

Originally posted by: glugglug

Originally posted by: calpha

VB is close----and the online help for it is better IMO----but Delphi sure seems powerful as hell. and multi threaded at that. Wonder why there's not more Delphi coded custom apps as oppossed to VB....it sure ranks right up there with ease of use IMO.

There are. If you really look into it Delphi/C++ Builder is used in tons of popular Win32 shareware apps, possibly even a majority of that sector.

The key there is _shareware_ apps, typically written by an individual. Large companies are afraid to use any non-M$ written development environment when coding for Win32.

P.S. If you are doing more than trivial applications, I would say Delphi beats VB for ease of use, hands down.

I was mostly talking about companies that write their own stuff for in house use----or to sell to corporate customers. With what I've seen so far from Delphi.....I see absolutely no reason that VB could be chosen over Delphi. It's just as easy to use, and far more powerful. And not just for being multi-threaded. Of all teh applications I've ever been a part of as a consultant----other then one where we had a lot of COM+ packages.... ( I don't know squat about using COM+ w/ Delphi)...I don't see where any of them could have not been written in Delphi.

And, yes, I do see a lot of Shareware apps that are written in Delphi. One of my favorite Icon Editors, IconEdit 2 is a Delphi app. And if I were to release some shareware today, it would be written in Delphi.

Other then the non-M$ "karma" that I definitely agree with, the only other possible side I can see is the plethora of M$ programmers combined with the buttloads of available online knowledge.

But, I'm surely amazed by it's Ease of use, and it's power. I was skeptical at first, after having rewritten a powerbuilder app to VB a few years ago-----(just b/c I had the impression that most other non M$ development products were crap).....but Delphi has been very refreshing so far.

 

[Gaunt]

Borland C++ Builder is essentially delphi wrapped with C++. It's just as simple to use, although if you're coming from using MFC and Visual C++ you will be sorely disappointed by the IDE, and some of the names of the methods...

One thing that sticks out is the C++ Builder AnsiString class. Works like CString, but the format method is definately NOT the same. Use AnsiString::sprintf instead. Just a tip....

To actually reply to the posted topic... I found C++ Builder to the one of the easiest languages to learn and be productive with, but considering I've dealt with so many different languages, and have learned to deal with them more on an abstract basis, learning a language isn't usually the difficult part. Usually what I find difficult (more-so than the language anyhow) is learning to use the tools provided with the language, such as the IDE and the debugger.

Lisp, Scheme, ML, and Prolog definately rank up there with the difficult to learn/be productive with languages, atleast in my case. Eventually you start to understand how things work, and productivity improves immensely (given the power of these languages) but getting to that point is a long and painful journey.

 

[rh71]

Cold Fusion for dynamic web applications. Simple to learn because it's all tag-based and it was built with database access in mind, so many of things web developers have always wanted to do with back-end dbs is as easy as using CF tags, similar to HTML tags.

Only downside is cost for the CF app server software.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Learning good programming practices, algorithms, data structures, and other important programming fundamentals and advanced topics, is a lot harder than any specific language imo.

 

[MonkeyK]

I'm not sure about Delphi, but when you count the IDE, VB is the easiest language that I have ever learned. Code completion, and a terrific debugger make it so.

-Mike

 

[calpha]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Learning good programming practices, algorithms, data structures, and other important programming fundamentals and advanced topics, is a lot harder than any specific language imo.

Bah, what's that. I'm just a hack

A linked list does what? What's a bTree? Who cares, I have a database. lol.
BTW---I mostly agree. But the key to good programming practices is language dependent....other then always initializing variables....not returning a ptr to a local variable......

But all in all.....if you can do C Hacking, I think you can do anything else.....other then maybe smalltalk or lisp.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: calpha

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Learning good programming practices, algorithms, data structures, and other important programming fundamentals and advanced topics, is a lot harder than any specific language imo.

Bah, what's that. I'm just a hack

Me too, of all the things I mentioned, I can't say I have a great knowledge of any :/

A linked list does what? What's a bTree? Who cares, I have a database. lol.

That pretty much describes me too

the key to good programming practices is language dependent....

Perhaps language family dependant, i.e. functional languages, imperative langages, oo languages, etc.

But all in all.....if you can do C Hacking, I think you can do anything else.....other then maybe smalltalk or lisp.

Not only smalltalk and lisp. There's a whole world of cool languages out there, and some of the coolest ones are the most unconventional ones.

 

[Spyro]

Not only smalltalk and lisp. There's a whole world of cool languages out there, and some of the coolest ones are the most unconventional ones.

This is probably just a bit off-topic, but has anyone here ever programmed using ruby?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Spyro

Not only smalltalk and lisp. There's a whole world of cool languages out there, and some of the coolest ones are the most unconventional ones.

This is probably just a bit off-topic, but has anyone here ever programmed using ruby?

I looked at it a little, when I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to learn either python or ruby. Not sure exactly why I picked python, but I'm glad I did. They're fairly similar and if you know one, I don't think there is a huge reason to learn the other unless you're bored. I'd rather spend time learning something totally different like C or lisp or something like that. Just MO.

 

[Spyro]

I looked at it a little, when I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to learn either python or ruby. Not sure exactly why I picked python, but I'm glad I did. They're fairly similar and if you know one, I don't think there is a huge reason to learn the other unless you're bored. I'd rather spend time learning something totally different like C or lisp or something like that. Just MO.

I'd actually reached that same conclusion on my own a while ago, but I never really learned enough about ruby to make a comparison between the two languages. Well anyway here's an interesting comparison between Python, Ruby, and Perl. The comments are a good read, and the last comment on the page is a nice summary of why phyton is better than ruby at this moment in time

grep -ia god /dev/urandom

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Spyro

I looked at it a little, when I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to learn either python or ruby. Not sure exactly why I picked python, but I'm glad I did. They're fairly similar and if you know one, I don't think there is a huge reason to learn the other unless you're bored. I'd rather spend time learning something totally different like C or lisp or something like that. Just MO.

I'd actually reached that same conclusion on my own a while ago, but I never really learned enough about ruby to make a comparison between the two languages. Well anyway here's an interesting comparison between Python, Ruby, and Perl. The comments are a good read, and the last comment on the page is a nice summary of why phyton is better than ruby at this moment in time

I actually remember reading that myself

grep -ia god /dev/urandom

You actually try it? "meaning of life" didn't turn out so well (ran that for a few days, never found one), but god seems to be quite a common find. I should see how long of a real word I can actually find in a reasonable period of time. Given enough time, you theoretically could find everything in there. Shakespeare, the 10 commandments, everything

 

[Spyro]

I actually remember reading that myself

I had a funny feeling that you were going to say that......

You actually try it? "meaning of life" didn't turn out so well (ran that for a few days, never found one), but god seems to be quite a common find. I should see how long of a real word I can actually find in a reasonable period of time. Given enough time, you theoretically could find everything in there. Shakespeare, the 10 commandments, everything

Hmmmm, I think I'm going to try to find something like that

 

[igowerf]

How does the performance of a VB app compare to that of a Delphi app?

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: igowerf
How does the performance of a VB app compare to that of a Delphi app?

It doesn't.

Delphi performance is basically the same as C++ performance. (Well a little slower because most C++ compilers have better optimizers, but at least in the same ballpark). VB performance is a sick joke.

P.S. If you are designing any complex user interfaces w/Delphi, especially if you want input fields taking special formats or you want an Excel-style grid, take a look at Orpheus components by Turbo Power. You won't be disappointed. The non-demo version comes with source and its pretty damn good sample code for learning some advanced Delphi techniques. Viewing form files as text can be enlightening also.

 

[Spyro]

VB performance is a sick joke.

I'd hate to know what you think of Java's performance.......

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: Spyro

VB performance is a sick joke.

I'd hate to know what you think of Java's performance.......

VB performance is closer to Java than it is to other "compiled" languages.
For some things, array manipulation mainly, java is much faster than VB.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Interesting, I always figured vb was fairly fast, considering you "compile" it in the IDE, and it just links to dll's and stuff, I figured most of the final code running was essentially just c++.

 

[Descartes]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Interesting, I always figured vb was fairly fast, considering you "compile" it in the IDE, and it just links to dll's and stuff, I figured most of the final code running was essentially just c++.

Correct, but don't tell the neophytes that, as you'll ruin their fun.

For the record, making claims on performance (or lack thereof) are unfounded unless proper documentation can back it up. "sick joke" doesn't exactly quantify anything.

I'll venture that 90% of VB applications employ COM components written in C++, so the overhead is in COM, not the language itself.

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: Descartes
For the record, making claims on performance (or lack thereof) are unfounded unless proper documentation can back it up. "sick joke" doesn't exactly quantify anything.

I'll venture that 90% of VB applications employ COM components written in C++, so the overhead is in COM, not the language itself.

OK, I'll back it up.....

Calling a C++ COM function that does nothing but return the system uptime in seconds as a double from a separate C++ application takes 1.99 microseconds per call on a 2GHz Pentium 4.

From "native" compiled VB this same COM method call takes 60 microseconds. The slowness isn't just COM overhead because C++ managed to deal with the extra overhead on the same COM function in just over 3% the amount of time.

Interestingly enough, VB is less efficient with COM than it is with normal method calls, but still nowhere near the speed it should be on those normal calls. Calling the function in the above example as a normal DLL method instead of through COM takes a little over 1 microsecond in C++, but 7 microseconds from VB, so the ratio of VB time to C time becomes 7 to 1 for normal Win32 DLLs vs. 30 to 1 for COM methods (assuming 0 time for the method call itself). I guess its possible (hell probably, I've got the overhead of a call to kernel32 within the COM method) that the ratio is worse than 7 to 1 for normal DLLs as well, just that the code WITHIN the call being executed is taking most of the 1 microsec from C++.

Pick any textbook computational problem, i.e. finding prime numbers, sorting, factoring, compression or encryption where you can look up the algorithm (not just calling existing library) etc, and implement the algorithm in VB. I'll bet you in C++ I get it at least an order of magnitude faster, probably 2. If it's dealing with arrays, make that 3-4 orders of magnitude faster.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

edit: duh, n/m