🚀 go-pugleaf

nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) writes:
	...
>     It's interesting to compare Java with C++.  Java is semantically
>closer to Delphi, though; it's one of those all-objects-on-the-heap,
>strongly typed, reference semantics, OOP languages.  Although Java
>has C syntax, it really is closer to some of the Object Pascal
>type OOPs.

Exactly my thoughts!  Like Sather, Eiffel, or Modula-3, to name three
other "all-objects-on-heap, strongly-typed, reference-semantics OOP
languages" for which good freeware or shareware implementations with
reasonably rich and useful libraries are easily available from the net
(I suspect Oberon, and several other no doubt excellent languages, 
also fall under this broad category, but have no first-hand experience
of them and their implementations).

I _suspect_ 90% or more of actual programs being written to not need
the multi-paradigmic character of C++, or, to be more precise, do not
really need the huge potential it offers for optimization _enough_ to
make it worth paying the cost of the "boilerplate" etc that one has
to pay for it.  However, practical considerations such as wishing to
only learn/use _one_ language, albeit large, and availability of
implementations for every conceivable platform, libraries and frameworks
for all sorts of purposes, etc etc, militate in C++'s favour anyway.

Perhaps Java (or Sather, Eiffel, Modula-3, Oberon...) might be better
ways to learn OOP; at least one of them is surely worth learning and
playing with for anybody with programming languages as a hobby (and
may well be worth learning anyway, to learn how one does things when
one [more or less] HAS to be OO:-) -- even if one has to then go 
back to C++ for work (or study), it IS a worthy experience.  And if
one of them happens to target an area one must do substantial work
in (and one is not fully allergic to learning more than one language,
of course:-), then, so much the better...

And then, of course, there are all of the _other_ OO languages,
those more or left _bereft_ of "strong typing" -- Smalltalk no
doubt the best-known, though Perl5 _should_ appeal most to those
who like multiparadigmic, "more than one way to skin a cat"
languages...:-), and Objective C might be most liked by C fans.
Those languages, collectively speaking, are "farther" from the
OO programming one would normally do in C++ (though Coplien's
"Advanced C++" does show how to simulate some of their "weak
typing" in C++, to be sure)... this would, perhaps, make them
less well-suited to _learning_ about OOP if one must eventually
use what one has learned in a C++ world, but, by the same token,
if one's already well-learned in "strongly typed" OOP, some sort
of experience with them could well be a useful broadening of one's
perspective.

So many cool, neat languages, so little time...!-)


Alex

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Email: martelli@cadlab.it                            Phone: +39 (51) 597313
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