7 Jan
2012
7 Jan
'12
6:50 p.m.
On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 07/01/12 11:38 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
?So yes, I think it's important that
you learn all this stuff. But do I
think you should start with a low-level language like C? No! Students should
not have to deal with buffer overruns, manual memory allocation, and the
like in their first exposure to programming.
So some education teaches Java a cough "safe language" and we get slow
memory hogs
because they know no better! yes they do need a proper education with
low level code in C or assembler etc and why the
other solutions are slower
eg from the Haskell wiki
(http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction#What_is_functional_programm…)
Whereas the C program describes the particular steps the machine must
make to perform a sort -- with most code dealing with the low-level
details of data manipulation -- the Haskell program encodes the
sorting algorithm at a much higher level, with improved brevity and
clarity as a result (at the cost of efficiency unless compiled by a
very smart compiler):
Cost of efficiency seems to be a problem not acknowledged by
proponents of most high level languages.
Dave Caroline