Subj : Re: Four Programming Questions To : comp.programming From : websnarf Date : Mon Jul 11 2005 07:13 pm W. D. Allen Sr. wrote: > Question one: Which language (basic, C++, java, etc) is easiest for learning > computer programming? I'd say Python or Basic (not Visual Basic, which is really more like Pascal). > Question Two: Which language is best for scientific programming? Historically this has been Fortran. Recently Sun has introduced a language called Fortress which has some math-friendly paradigms (like allowing Unicode symbols; meaning greek letters, etc). If you are not so interested in making applications, but rather just in computation, you should look at Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple. > Question Three: Which language is best for web programming? No idea -- lots of people like to use php. For dynamic interactive content flash is clearly very popular. For just the basics, you've got to know HTML (which is not really a language) and Javascript. > Question Four: Which language is best for games programming? Depends on the kind of game. There is a language out there call Euphoria, which is specifically architected for making cheesy 2D DOS/Windows arcade style games. If you want to write text adventures, you could probably write it in Python or Lisp or something like that. For high-performance 3D games, you're going to want to go with C++ -- you can usually spike performance with some amount of inline assembly language. But for truly high level programming, lots of 3D games often mix C++ with an embedded scripting language called Lua. Sun is pushing the "games on cell phones" angle quite hard these days. The point there, is that cell phones use such widely different CPU architectures that it would be insane to write a game that only targetted one single cell phone. Java gives you a way to deploy a single game with a single binary onto multiple platforms, which might be really useful for deploying the game on many cell phones at once. For arcade-style web base games, flash is the only serious choice. But not a lot of games have pushed 3D on flash -- I think it doesn't have the right 3D back end, or maybe load times would be intolerable. -- Paul Hsieh http://www.pobox.com/~qed/ http://bstring.sf.net/ .