[NTLUG:Discuss] Wanting to speak the language

[Steve Baker]

Ohh!! Language War!!

The *vast* majority of OpenSource projects are written in C or C++.

Someone is bound to argue with that statement - so let's try to get
some facts onto the table...

If you go to SourceForge (by far the biggest repository of OpenSource
projects), and do a search by programming language, you'll find a LONG
list of the number of projects written in each of the languages that
are 'out there'.  Most languages are used in a mere handful of projects.

The top four most popular languages are:

       C++  (14830 projects)
       C    (14341 projects)
       Java (14095 projects)
       PHP  (10439 projects)

All of the other languages are *FAR* below those in popularity (PERL
is number five with 5691 projects).

Now consider that C++ is a pure superset of C.  If you learn C++,
you know C.  So a more useful list would have C/C++ at the top with
twice the number of projects as Java.

I suggest you learn C - then progress to C++.  Then you'll have the
programming skills to work on about half of all of the OpenSource
projects out there.  Switching from C++ to Java is pretty easy. PHP
also borrows a lot from C/C++ and Java - so switching to that later
wouldn't be such a great mental upheaval.

OK - now that's out of the way...Emacs or Vi?

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>    WorkEmail: <sjbaker at link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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