31 replies to this topic

[hehehahahoho]

C++, C#, COBOL, PASCAL, JAVA, etc......which is the most powerful?

[Mihail121]

C, Java, Pascal but of course they are no match for BRAINFUCK

[hehehahahoho]

Mihail121 said:

C, Java, Pascal but of course they are no match for BRAINFUCK

heher...

[Ed Mack]

Each language is best suited to a different set of tasks, ideally a programmer would be familiar with a wide range.

C/C++ is great for library and app developement, and generally anything (especially low-level stuff).
C# is good for quickly writing desktop apps
Java is great for enterprise applications
Pascal is good for teaching students
Cobol is... ?

[bramz]

Pascal??? why bother teaching them a dead language? I hated it! =)

Cobol is good for administration software ... well ... "good" as in "still being used".

Bramz

[Tufty]

bramz said:

Pascal??? why bother teaching them a dead language? I hated it! =)

Cobol is good for administration software ... well ... "good" as in "still being used".

Bramz

Pascal's not dead, quite a few people still use Delphi don't they, which is still Borland Pascal at the core. Hell I even learned it myself, and it taught me some useful stuff.

Cobol is only around still because of the big companies (banks and such) that still have software developed in it. They've invested too much time and effort to just change away from it, but I'm sure they will eventually!

[bramz]

Ah yeah of course ... If you count Delphi as Pascal, then it's not dead yet :) But I'm still horrified by the thought ... I'm one of those you know ... We actually had to learn (turbo) Pascal in the first year at university ... In the second year, we even had to do graphics programming in it! Well ... I can tell you: I'm glad I left it all behind :)

You're exactly right about COBOL ... At the time of the millenium bug, they had to teach hunders of programmers COBOL ... exactly because of that :)

Bramz

[Einheri]

Machine code is the most powerful! Not only that, but it's easy; you only need two of the keys on your keyboard! It's fast, it's compact, and you can do anything in it!

Damnit, now I'm back to sounding like a C++ programmer. :tongue:

But seriously; each of those languages is Turing complete and, therefore, as powerful as anything else out there. You just have to weigh up which one's going to make your life easier.

[Polar Sleuth]

bramz said:

Ah yeah of course ... If you count Delphi as Pascal, then it's not dead yet :) But I'm still horrified by the thought ... I'm one of those you know ... We actually had to learn (turbo) Pascal in the first year at university ... In the second year, we even had to do graphics programming in it! Well ... I can tell you: I'm glad I left it all behind :)

The one language I'm most glad of leaving behind is Modula-2. For those who have never heard of it, be thankful. The creator of Pascal and one of the professors from my college desided to "correct" everything that was "wrong" with Pascal. The compiler was a three-stage compiler before getting into linking and writing the executable. I had the unfortunate timing of taking the "introductory course" while they were still writing the text book and the compiler wasn't quite in beta. Average compile times staggered into the hours with plenty of disk swaps. Yuck.

Then again, each member of the tenured staff had a language he created and crafted a course around. A four-year long nightmare of bad langguages...

Thanks for reminding me....
Lew

[Tufty]

Polar Sleuth said:

bramz said:

Ah yeah of course ... If you count Delphi as Pascal, then it's not dead yet :) But I'm still horrified by the thought ... I'm one of those you know ... We actually had to learn (turbo) Pascal in the first year at university ... In the second year, we even had to do graphics programming in it! Well ... I can tell you: I'm glad I left it all behind :)

The one language I'm most glad of leaving behind is Modula-2. For those who have never heard of it, be thankful. The creator of Pascal and one of the professors from my college desided to "correct" everything that was "wrong" with Pascal. The compiler was a three-stage compiler before getting into linking and writing the executable. I had the unfortunate timing of taking the "introductory course" while they were still writing the text book and the compiler wasn't quite in beta. Average compile times staggered into the hours with plenty of disk swaps. Yuck.

Then again, each member of the tenured staff had a language he created and crafted a course around. A four-year long nightmare of bad langguages...

Thanks for reminding me....
Lew

I've heard of Modula-2 but never had any experience in it. I think I'm happy not to have! I didn't have to go as far as graphical stuff in Turbo Pascal either, my college hadn't installed those libraries so as much as we got was text-based.

I have used something like 15-17 different programming languages now. My favourite so far is definitely C++ though :)

[hehehahahoho]

"I have used something like 15-17 different programming languages now"?

wow!

[Tufty]

hehehahahoho said:

"I have used something like 15-17 different programming languages now"?

wow!

Yup. I didn't say I was particularly far along with most of them, but I've been programming for nearly 18 years across various systems, and I've had the opportunity to pick up a new language or 2 virtually every time. Started on the Spectrum, C64, Amiga, BBC Micro.... and then eventually onto the PC where I've played with everything from Pascal to Java to C#, as well as languages like Blitz3D and DarkBasic.

[anubis]

Quote

Machine code is the most powerful! Not only that, but it's easy; you only need two of the keys on your keyboard! It's fast, it's compact, and you can do anything in it!

Damnit, now I'm back to sounding like a C++ programmer.

But seriously; each of those languages is Turing complete and, therefore, as powerful as anything else out there.

Einheri : In one of my brighter moments (in the bathroom) i took a roll of toilet paper and the black and white checker tokens i have and build myself a turing machine. I guess the point is... who needs computers and machine code ? ;)

But seriously... isn't computer science the art of abstraction ?

[Mihail121]

Boah... i'm kinda getting mentally blind cause i don't see any sence at all in this discussion!!! Turing complete or not Turing complete, C++ or machine code: every language is useful for solving a problem or a set of problems and therefore every language is good!

[Einheri]

anubis said:

Quote

Machine code is the most powerful! Not only that, but it's easy; you only need two of the keys on your keyboard! It's fast, it's compact, and you can do anything in it!

Damnit, now I'm back to sounding like a C++ programmer.

But seriously; each of those languages is Turing complete and, therefore, as powerful as anything else out there.

Einheri : In one of my brighter moments (in the bathroom) i took a roll of toilet paper and the black and white checker tokens i have and build myself a turing machine. I guess the point is... who needs computers and machine code ? ;)

But seriously... isn't computer science the art of abstraction ?

And your hobo-computer would be able to perform any operation that C++, FORTRAN, or hatever could perform. Therefore it is just as powerful. The key point of my post was the part about choosing which makes your life easier; For exaple, you probably could write quake 4 using some tissue and a bunch of checker tokens, but it wouldn't be making your life any easier. Similarly, but to much less of an extreme, you could write a MMORPG back-end in C, but something like Java might make things an awful lot nicer for you.

[Mihail121]

Einheri look, it is not only the structure, the essence of a given language that one should take into account when doing such a comparison between them. There are a great number of other details and factors that one should also concern to meet the ultimately correct decision. One needs for example a given problem to base the comparison onto, because we shoudn't compare the language by personal preferance only, but we should examine how effectively they solve the problem. And only then one could state: this language is better than that one for solving the current problem!

[Einheri]

But the question asked was not actually "which language is better than that one for solving the current problem?" was it? It was "Which is more powerful". My comment about them all being Turing complete was to say that they are all equally powerful; that they can all accomplish the same things. But what I did not say, and what it seems that, for whatever reason, you seem to think I did, is that this makes them all an equally wise choice for any given problem; in fact I qualified my original statement with the implication of that very thing. It really seems that you are unrealisingly arguing the exact same point as I am; why else would you use a statement such as "we shoudn't compare the language by personal preferance only, but we should examine how effectively they solve the problem." as an answer to a post that supported examples such as "you could write a MMORPG back-end in C, but something like Java might make things an awful lot nicer for you"? Aren't those two quotes basically saying the same thing?

[Mihail121]

Yes they are, but i think i've answered your question, which indeed was "Which is more powerful". We CANNOT say, which language is more powerful without having a stable platform to base the comparison onto :)

[anubis]

Einheri : Hey, I was just kidding... I thought i'd just jump in on your joke. No offence intended.

[Einheri]

Mihail121 said:

Yes they are, but i think i've answered your question, which indeed was "Which is more powerful". We CANNOT say, which language is more powerful without having a stable platform to base the comparison onto :)

I... didn't ask that question? I'm really, really, confused, now.

anubis said:

Einheri : Hey, I was just kidding... I thought i'd just jump in on your joke. No offence intended.

No offence was taken at all; the post was a good one. I just thought that perhaps my point needed a little clarifying.