Programming question

[DooMBoy]

Just a programming question, or something like one:
First off, exactly how many kinds of programming code are there?
Second off, what is the hardest to learn? Easiest?
Third off, for all you programmer dork John Carmack wannabes, what got you started programming, and what do you program in most of the time? If you've coded anything, tell us about it.

[Naked Snake]

DooMBoy said:

Just a programming question, or something like one:
First off, exactly how many kinds of programming code are there?
Second off, what is the hardest to learn? Easiest?
Third off, for all you programmer dork John Carmack wannabes, what got you started programming, and what do you program in most of the time? If you've coded anything, tell us about it.

1) countless
2) I dunno the hardest but people say that VB, Basic and Java are easy
3) heh

[Job]

I heard that assembly and C++ are the hardest.

[Bloodshedder]

I found C++ easy to learn, at least the basics. Mastering it takes a bit more skill. VB.NET, the language I'm learning now, seems pretty easy as well. Programming in assembler would most likely be regarded as the hardest, unless maybe you compare that to languages like BrainFuck or ShakespeareLang.

[timmie]

1) how many stars are in the sky? Maybe not that many, but still lots.
2) hardest is definately assembler. I did some of that in school and it sucked. Well, it was fun, but it took a lot of time to do the simplest of things. The easiest would have to be batch files, I guess.
3) I started back in the day of VIC-20's (I was probably 9 or so) because it was fun making noises on the computer. Now I program in VisualAge Smalltalk at work and VC++ at home.

[DarkWolf]

VB (or one of it's forms) is fun and fairly easy to learn, especially with the numerous ActiveX controls you can use. However, when you go to distribute your program you might have to tack on quite a few files on which your program depends. VB is also a bit slow when it comes to certain things.

I've only done a little bit of C/C++ and C seems to be a bit harder than C++. It also depends if you're writing a program from scratch or doing something like a Doom source port.

And of course there's programming theory, which isn't language specific. It doesn't hurt to have some.

[doomer]

hardest? I think C and C++

[deep]

Hardest is ambiguous.

First there's the difficulty in learning the basic concepts. Although assembler is somewhat hard to learn, once learned, it's actually pretty simple compared to ALL the things you can do in C++.

Now as to using it and getting work done, assembler is usually the hardest because it just takes more lines of code - especially when it comes to API stuff. Sometimes it's actually the easiest because at the assembler level on can do things in a few lines of code that take way more in a higher level language.

An example of that is a math support system I wrote. Originally it was in a C like language and then a year later in assembler (when I learned the asm for that machine). The ASM version was way easier since I could get the sign of numbers just by loading and not having to do a compare. Same thing for overflow detection.

[Graf Zahl]

doomer said:

hardest? I think C and C++

You have never seen Cobol or some other ancient progamming language. THOSE are hard to learn! C/C++ is actually very easy to learn because it has a simple syntax and is extremely flexible. Just don't make the mistake and start with the complex stuff it has to offer. In that case you WILL get lost - believe me.

It is not without reason that C has become the most popular programming language.

(And for the record: I don't consider VB a programming language!) :-D

[deep]

Graf Zahl said:

You have never seen Cobol or some other ancient progamming language....

Cobol is extremely simple and easy to learn. Much easier than C. Why? Because Cobol does not have the abstraction of addressing and indirect addressing, which is very much an assembler construct. This is the number 1 difficulty for many people attempting to learn C.

Since I thought about it since the last post, I'd probably say Fortran is the easiest language to learn for math/engineer/scientific types since expressions are very familiar. I learned Fortran in 1 day (coming from assembler). Cobol is a 2 day affair. Both extremely simple to learn if one knows another language with more complex/abstract constructs and concepts.

[Derrick]

I would suggest one playing around with QuickBasic.