On 30/04/2018 14:16, Rob Morley wrote:
>   He can't accept that the
> world and its technology has moved on, because his brain is stuck in
> that mode,

There's no call for gratuitous rudeness, OM.


> I admit that I had problems getting my head around Java when I had
> previously mainly programmed in C (and didn't like C++ at all -
> Smalltalk was good though, and ADA's not bad for an old chick).  But
> then I had difficulty with Fortran when I had previously only used Basic
> (where are the line numbers???). You adapt and learn to use appropriate
> tools, you don't unplug an angle grinder and try to use it as a file.

I've never experienced any difficulty moving from one language to
another and professionally have dealt with most of the common
ones in my time; this comes from having a very good grounding
at the low level because then you can picture how the language
with which you deal maps into machine code. Perhaps I could help you
with your expressed difficulty?

FORTRAN, BASIC, RTL/2, CORAL, PL/M-86, PASCAL, C (many times over),
C++, FORTH, many assemblers and even at one client, machine
code typed directly into a PROM programmer despite my
advice to them that their estimated development time of 3 months
would take about a week in C.

Actually, at one client, I was interviewed to take over something
from a recent computer scientist with all the pomposity that entails,
who had spent 6 weeks on aC based project without completing it, and
I said why C and not Visual Basic, and as part of the interview showed
how easy it was to do serial port stuff in VB, so ended up there in
a contract for the next two years.

There's a lot of snobbishness and elitism in the VB versus C workplace,
but then, if a project involved screen, keyboard, printer, and Internet,
I'd unhesitatingly advice the client to go for VB for financial reasons.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05