How do people still program C++/Java without crying?

[TheAnimus]

I mean, they've just stood still for the last few years.

I just die a little inside every time i have to drop down to C++ world, most often this is because i'm doing some interop with .Net and its the only way i can do dodgy things with pointers.

But this begs the question, why are people still making new projects in these languages that i'll end up having to work with?

I mean stuff like this in C#

string.Join(",",assetsMissingWeights.ConvertAll(x => x.BbgCode).ToArray())))

I find incredibly anoying because i need the ToArray, because the tits who made the string class, used an array rather than an IEnumerable<string>....

its also worth nothing this is a great example of lamba +linq in C#, we have a List of 'Asset' object, which i want to generate a Comma seperated string of one of its properties. A clean example of it working how it should could be seen the line before:

List<Asset> assetsMissingWeights = assets.FindAll(x => !weights.ContainsKey(x));

But thats nothing of the pain i feal when i C++. And java, well its been 5 months, 2 weeks, 1 day, and about 5 hours since my last line.

I think CS suffers greatly from people been luddites, sticking with languages they know. No i don't think we should all write apps in Python, but i think people really should learn more of the obscure and very interesting languages (Boo and Nermle been a good two) so we can put pressure on the decision makers of these main languages and not have to work with such verbose languages.

Its shocking that so few people actually leverage these features that are present in a language like C#, i've been able to re-write this very 2.0 style code to be about 45% lines less... In doing so made the bug very obvious, these functional style language paradigms do make business sense.

[directhex]

doesn't java have generics too as of 1.5?

[TheAnimus]

yes, but there a compiler trick.... thats another reason to loath them.

The thing i'm talking about loving there is extension methods (breaking traditional OO paradigms) and more importantly Lambdas. Which stop anonymous methods looking fugly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...pression_trees

nope, no support for those.

x => x.BbgCode

is beatuful way of letting a simple extension method know which property of the generic type, you want to get at.

[Spud1]

People stick to the old fashioned ways for a few reasons I think..largely its because theres this belief in the industry that if you want to program, you *need* to learn C++ first. Thats the general opinion I have come across anyway outside of the universities. Its out of date and a pain to work with, but the tradition is there and its going to take a lot to break it. People are still writing new apps using MFC for crying out loud! Madness I tell you.

Java is (from what I can tell) seen as a good way into OO in education, which probably explains its proliferation..it is the first OO language I as introduced to, and it did me no favours whatsoever. I failed to get most of the actual concepts by learning that language, and it wasn't until I looked at C# a year later that everything actually clicked into place. Many people do stick with Java though and therefore take it into their professional life after university..and we're starting to see the effect of that.

I guess another big reason is that lots of the newer languages are quite high level, and there is this belief that relatively high level languages (like C#, python) are not very efficient..when this clearly is not the case. Like any language it comes down the to compiler and how you structure your code. Things like Lambda expressons really help to speed things up here, making your code tighter, more efficient and easier to read.

C, C++ and Java all have their uses in certain applications, but in reality 9/10 times there is a better choice. We have stuck with .net/C# for all our applications that we produce as a company, and are trying to keep up to date with the latest advancements. All our current projects are based on .NET 3 using WPF for the interface side of things, and although our backend is still .NET 2.0 at the moment we're slowly rewriting things like the DALs to utilise LinQ properly. I'm sure that one day the use of more modern languages will filter through to the larger organisations, but its going to take time.

on the note of playing with new languages..this is more just for fun but i've been playing with LOLCODE too..and it actually makes a surprising amount of sense lol. Clearly it has no future as a serious language, but its great fun to write little apps with it kthxbye

[jmc41]

Unfortunately most Uni's concentrate on Java firstly, with maybe some other obscure languages (Haskell, Prolog, etc...) and very little stuff that'll be useful in the real world; unless you are going into a mathematical or teaching field which are the only places I can see them being used.

By the time they catch up with the latest languages, we'll all have moved on again.

[manwithnoname]

How do people still program C++/Java without crying? - personally, with C++, it was getting paid.

[directhex]

the big question is though, why do people develop new software using "bad" languages? i know i avoid writing in things like c because i'd rather spend my time on the actual task at hand, not on fighting the language to make it do what i want or expect

and having been on one of those java-heavy degrees, i know i wouldn't pick it as a language if i had the option of c#

[Steve]

At Bristol Uni in the first year they teach CS students C, Verilog, Java, Haskell... I think that's it.

They start with C because it tries to impart upon the students the knowledge of how a programming language actually does stuff to a computer.

That can generally lead to two types of people - those who, as they're exposed to higher level languages, are uneasy about them; and those who are grateful for the ease that the HLL brings.

But allow me to put a CSE spin on things. We get down to the hardware level. It's a case of write in C, or write the compiler backend so you can use what you want... and so see doesn't make me cry.

I guess my point is - while I don't cry when using C, I sure as hell wouldn't use it if I was doing something high level.

[directhex]

there are two ways to try & teach CS - bottom-up (starting with 'nasty' concepts like needing to manually use malloc, and eventually ending up in floaty object land) or top-down (starting with nice easy class libraries that let you teach algorithm concepts etc without caring about the fine detail, and ending up stripping away all you know as you move closer down the chain towards c or assembly)

personally, these days, i think a top-down approach is more valuable, because if anything, it's easier to get people engaged - bottom-up is much harder to understand from the outset, which can exclude people who take a little longer to get the concepts. by starting with the high-level stuff, illogically, it makes it easier to teach CS fundamentals like list sorting or whatnot than a "fundamental" language where you need to teach people a LOT of hard-to-stomach crap before they can be productive

[NovaSphere]

God, it's like I'm trying to read Chinese...

I praise you for having the time and willingness to do all such stuff!

(As for your topic, I never got what's with all this freaky signs and all, couldn't they have made it like, shorter and easier xD?)

[Steve]

See I disagree with you hex.

I learned a couple of languages (not very well) prior to Uni, and was grateful for being taught bottom-up.

I guess it depends what you're trying to achieve. For straight CS, perhaps it is a better idea to go top-down.

[Templar87]

Last time I used C#, the thing I noticed most was how similar it was to Java, to the point of being near-identical as far as I could tell - can I ask you guys which features you find useful in C#, which Java lacks?

[RedPutty]

Java seems fine to me. I think mostly the problem is with bad coders rather than bad languages.

Many people never really "get" a language (or OO) and rail at it instead of realising where the problem really lies :-)

[TheAnimus]

See I disagree with you hex.

I learned a couple of languages (not very well) prior to Uni, and was grateful for being taught bottom-up.

I guess it depends what you're trying to achieve. For straight CS, perhaps it is a better idea to go top-down.

I think this really depends. If your doing straight CS, do you really need to know 'how' it works? If the answer is yes (and i think it damn well should be) then starting with flowcharts and the like, looking at the structure of the older simpler CPUs or RISC ones.

BUT, while i'm not disputing there is a time and a place for C/C++ even the best microkernel would still need some un-managed code, and i don't think its right to push this down to the CPU microcode.

The thing is, far too many unis and this is equally applied to york/icl/oxbridge focus on actual languages and paradigms.

Yes writing a simple compiler is a good idea, and the BCS are right to demand it for accreditation but, its more important that people learn lots of languages, and the good features from each.

When you know how these langauges have to be compiled/parsed it really does explain them, and its very very easy to understand them. In .Net i'd say that once you understand partial classes from anonymous methods, then lambda's are obvious. Its necessery to understand such things so that you would understand what happens if you have a litteral referencing issue such as:

foreach (var x in enumarableObjects){
delegatesToBeLaterDispatched.Add(delegate {// something that uses a ValueType from x, like a DateTime});
}
foreach (var x in delegatesToBeLaterDispatched)
    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(x);

If people don't have a firm working grasp, they won't understand why something like that wouldn't work as expected.

Java seems fine to me. I think mostly the problem is with bad coders rather than bad languages.

Many people never really "get" a language (or OO) and rail at it instead of realising where the problem really lies :-)

Last time I used C#, the thing I noticed most was how similar it was to Java, to the point of being near-identical as far as I could tell - can I ask you guys which features you find useful in C#, which Java lacks?

Please see my first two posts in this thread.

Try and do that in Java (or even C#1.0, rather than 3.0/5 like my example in the first post).

Simply you can't without been a lot more verbose, which is bad.

[Steve]

Interestingly, at Bristol, they never touch on .net. I guess because the CS department is a Linux shop, and doesn't want to touch mono.

As such, I don't have a clue what that code example is on about

The one good thing I would say is that they do throw a lot of languages at the students, and they keep doing so throughout the CS degree... but never anything .net-ish.

[TheAnimus]

yes i never did any .Net at uni, hardly un-usual that, but i was also only doing half CS, half Cybernetics.

(but i'd done some .Net before uni, and didn't really like it much, version 1.0 wasn't all that, and i simply thought i'll stick with java)