From: EB <ebonak-a-@...>
Date: 2006-11-20T12:30:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs Java vs c++

Chilkat Software wrote:
> 
> About 20 years ago, when I graduated from University of Illinois' with a 
> BS in Computer Science / Engineering,
> the department's philosophy was for students to acquire an understanding 
> of computers and programming
> from the ground up.  That meant from the electronic circuit level, to 
> the logic level (NAND and NOR gates),
> to assembly programming, and on up.  My answer to the original question 
> is based on this philosophy.
> I recommend starting at the C/C++ level simply to gain a fundamental 
> understanding of the bits & bytes,
> pointers, pointer arithmetic, structure layouts, byte ordering, 
> structure member alignment, dynamic memory
> allocation on the heap as opposed to the stack, etc.   Understanding 
> this gives you a good idea
> as to what's going on "under the hood" with higher-level languages.  
> Things won't be so mysterious.
> It'll pay off in the long run.

For someone wanting/needing a deeper understanding of how things work
this is true.

However, for someone with specific goals in mind, hopefully the languages
will isolate him/her from the bit-twiddling issues. E.g. smart file IO
libraries will worry about big-endian vs little endian etc.

I see this as one of the major features of higher level languages
such as Ruby/Python.

(Analogy, I can drive a car and get from here to there w/o understanding
how every part of the car's engine works. And not everyone wanting to
drive a car to get somewhere wants to know either :-)

Worrying about malloc/free (or new/delete), run-away pointers etc
is  not something I want to deal with unless I have a good reason
for it. 99% of the time it's not required.

Now, if you are writing primarily OS service code etc, then of course
it's all different :-)

EB