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Programming in the Linux operating system: where to start?

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Edvard:
BASIC can have permanent damaging effects to innocent souls
--- End quote ---
Yours truly = living proof ;D (I still say "string" in my head when I see the $ symbol...)

Seriously, I was just on the DC IRC channel discussing this very thing.

There's a lot of talk of people who have hit the ceiling of what C++ is capable of and where it's going (besides MS development of it slowing almost to a stop...), and the new platforms (C#, .Net, Silverlight, etc.) are pumping in fresh blood to old ideas.
C is still a big cornerstone of the foundation, and the Mac OSX crowd has adopted Objective-C as it's language of choice. Python came out the clear winner in the "most popular scripting language" category (see the link at this thread) and Perl continues to be an elephant in the parlor (see below).

But I think Housetier phrased it well: "Where do you stop starting?"
When do you stop surveying diving boards and eventually jump in the f'ing pool?

I love and know Linux and am VERY curious about lots of programming languages. I've done a bit of research on the job market for the Linux-savvy, and it looks VERY promising. I would also like a better job...

So I've come up with a game plan:
1- Read enough about C/C++ to gain a conversational knowledge of it, if not the ability to code a thing or two. I'd like to know what a "stack pointer" is before I go popping my mouth off about it, and if I learn enough, maybe I'll even contribute to an open-source project just for the street cred.
2- Learn Perl. Why? Because despite the rising popularity of Python, Perl devs are still in great demand (look on http://www.indeed.com and compare "perl" results with "python") and I have a family to feed. Besides, it's a wonderfully powerful tool (especially on Unix/BSD/Linux), it's object-oriented and massively extendable. Besides, Perl 6 is coming (albeit slowly), and it looks big.
Even though it's developed in Haskell. :huh:
3- Move to Python and Mono. I think that more "average Joe" Linux development is going to move to Python, and the Windows ex-patriates are going to be feeding at the Mono trough. That may even be where the money is going and I'd like to be ready if that wave breaks.

That's my  :two:
 

f0dder:
There's a lot of talk of people who have hit the ceiling of what C++ is capable of and where it's going (besides MS development of it slowing almost to a stop...)-Edvard (May 13, 2008, 07:36 PM)
--- End quote ---
Hm, MS development of C++ slowing to a stop? They've enhanced the compilers with every version including vs2008, they've added a work in progress C++0x expansion pack, etc...

Also, I daresay it's only in the most recent years people are beginning to really harness the power of the C++ language :)

Not implying it's the one-and-only language to learn, since that would be silly, but I still see it as something with a great many years to live.

Edvard:
Ah f0dder, I knew I could count on you to cut through the hearsay...

Yes, that was what I heard was that MS was concentrating so much on the "new" things that not much has been added to the C++ convention, but maybe it just doesn't need that much added to it?
I would agree that it still has a lot of life left, but how long?
Just as there was slow and subtle shift away from ASM and C, there is a (slow and subtle...) shift away from C++ and Java that is happening NOW.
That doesn't mean that it won't be used or even usable beyond the foreseeable future, but the focus of activity will be elsewhere and that's what I'm attempting to look ahead to...

f0dder:
Well, they're probably spending more resources on things like c# and the like, but imho that's at least partially because the dotNET languages are still relatively new and developing, especially the platform as a whole, with all the libraries. On the other hand, C++ is somewhat more of a static target, although C++0x will change that - and still just about every C++ compiler has some conformance bugs etc.

ASM is still being used too, and it won't go entirely away either, but it's been pushed mostly to (the relatively low-end) embedded stuff, to where you need to squeeze out every last drop of performance, and to hobbyists... not like back in the early 1990'es where many apps needed at least some assembly here and there to maintain decent performance. Even though compiler intrinsics for the fancy instruction sets have gotten better, even I can usually beat the output with hand-crafted assembly - and I'm by no means an optimization expert.

Imho it should be forbidden to write web-facing stuff in C, especially if you insist on using str* function and manual malloc/free :)

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