Paulo Pinto: > Pascal - Provided a very good way to learn structured programming
Pascal today is a bit obsolete language to teach programming (even if FreePascal compiles a Object Pascal updated in many useful ways). But recently I have realized that the style of programming of Pascal is useful to teach/train to use more often static memory. Dynamic allocation of memory (as usually done in Python and even in D) is quite handy, but once you care a bit for performance, you see that static/stack memory helps a lot. And it's not just a matter of performance: my experience shows me that thinking about some algorithms in term of static memory helps understand them better. Understanding the bounds of memory used by an algorithm is not a secondary thing, it's often tied to the structure of the algorithm. So often if you don't understand clearly the invariants of how the algorithm uses the memory, you have not fully understood the algorithm. Static memory asks to be more precise about memory usages, and this helps you understand the algorithm better (and will often improve the performance of your code too, even if you use Java). > Scala - Seems to be the next big language in the JVM It's an interesting language, but its type system is quite complex, maybe a bit too much for the average programmer. ----------------------- Justin Johansson: > What encourages you to say so. JavaScript is already pretty much ubiquitous > so perhaps one might say that it is the "Contemporary Big Language" but do > you think it will become even bigger (perhaps in its next version?) to take > on the title of the "Next Big Language" posthumously?< JavaScript has to expland its usage still a lot in desktop and server-side usages. ----------------------- Fawzi Mohamed: > I see a future for D in the HPC field, For that few ideas from a good numerical computing languages like Chapel may help D a lot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel_%28programming_language%29 Bye, bearophile
