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What to do after Python?

Cees de Groot cg at gaia.intranet.cdegroot.com
Sun Feb 18 15:17:25 EST 2001 
Roy Smith  <roy at panix.com> said:
>Actually, the problem with C is that it hides too much of the computer 
>behind all that code.  I spent a few years writing C on alphas, and never 
>even found out how many registers the danged thing had. 

Err, lots? What I meant was that C forces you to think about memory
issues, pointers, and such close-to-hardware stuff without forcing you to
to actually dive into a particular CPU (ah, those days when "register"
had measurable effects...). Much closer, and you'll indeed do assembly
(or machine code - back in the 70's I didn't have an assembler for the
C64 so I did everything in machine code inside Basic DATA statements
;-)). Probably every programmer should learn assembly as well, but then,
C programming often drives you under the hood anyway (dirty work like
picking coredumps apart).

A fun way to learn assembler is to play core wars...

>I don't suppose I could interest you in fortran?

Well, I've been following this advise of learning a language-per-year myself
for the last decade or so, and I think some dusty corner of my brains has
Fortran knowledge (dig, dig - ah: there it is. I ported PDP-11 Fortran/77 to
MS-DOS in 1986 :-)).

But since my languager-per-year adagium let me execute "learn Smalltalk"
last year, I'm an ST convert, so sorry: no interest.

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
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