I agree with everything you’ve said. I must admit, it took me a couple of years to appreciate structure and strong-typed languages. But they are great for producing well-written work, within their framework.
>I agree with everything you’ve said. I must admit, it took me a couple of years to appreciate structure and strong-typed languages.
You know, I think I was kinda the other way around. I taught myself on Pascal, with little more than the compiler and the user’s/programmer’s guides that came with it. {good old TP}
A few years later (2 or 3) I began my formal programming education; and that was where I was introduced to C/C++. Having been spoiled by the TP compiler which gives you decent error messages, I quickly came to hate C syntax.
One particular incident that stands out in my mind is, for a particular very-low level/intro programming class, I had a homework all ready to go and and decided to pretty it up and expand the commenting a bit... when I was finished with the minor revisions the compiler rejected the source with an incomprehensible error message saying “number radix out of bounds,” showing this error to the instructor proved unhelpful, as even he could not tell me what it meant. As you’re probably thinking, it turned out to be that the 0 I had prefixed onto an array index, in order to line up a series of such indexings, changed the meaning of the number to be octal and the compiler was trying to say that ‘08’ doesn’t exist in octal. {I actually found out that’s what that error message was saying while reading the Unix Hater’s Handbook some years later.}
And, thinking about ‘structure’ in general it is precisely the feature that allows formal logic proofs and the “mathematical trick” of induction. Any programmer who scoffs at the utility of THOSE has no business in the field.
An article I’d recently read popped immediately to mind when I read your reply:
http://www.eetimes.com/design/eda-design/4008921/Expressive-vs-permissive-languages—Is-that-the-question-?pageNumber=1
>But they are great for producing well-written work, within their framework.
Indeed.
Just take a look at an implementation of the Queen-positioning problem (placing 8 queens on a chess board in such manner that none endangers any other) implemented in imperative/procedural vs Rule-based, vs logic-based programming. The difference is amazing and, IMO, shows the value of “choosing the right tool for the job” in the realm of programming as well as the power of changing your perspective on a problem may make a solution easier.