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On Sep 28, 4:56*am, Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
> Paavo Helde <myfirstn...@osa.pri.ee> wrote:
> > Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote in news:792154042370428054.785525bclark-
> > es.co...@free.teranews.com:
>
> >> I have not found an answer to the question why C++ is the most preferred
> >> language.
>
> > It isn't. Some other languages like C, Java and Objective-C are more
> > popular. See
> >http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/conte...pci/index.html
>
> > In principle, one should choose the language according to the problem what
> > one is trying to resolve. If one is planning to do a multi-million line
> > complex and fast system, C++ is a good candidate (along with Ada and some
> > others). OTOH, a hundred line program can be written in anything.
>
> In that case what is Visual Basic useful for?

GUI heavy Windows apps

On Thursday, September 27, 2012 6:12:12 PM UTC+2, (unknown) wrote:
>
> 2) My favorite reason is: because C++ is *alive* ! I don't know no other
> language that has changed so much over time.

I do. It's definitely not my intention to be a troll and start a programming language war here, but don't forget Fortran with its different revisions: FORTRAN77, Fortran 90/95, Fortran 2003,...

During my PhD I've been programming for 5 years in Fortran 95. For the scientific work that I needed to to, it just rocked!

Now I switched to industry and I am learning C++ for about one year. It's also an interesting journey... lots of stuff to learn!

What language do I prefer? None. I just pick the right tool for the right job!

Regards,
Bart

Brian wrote:

> Most of those surveys seem to have C++ at or near the top of the list.
> To put it another way why should C++ be more popular than Visual Basic as
> Visual Basic is easy to learn and there is less code to write?

Because you can actually get work done with C++, or any other language, and
you don't risk having to throw it all down the toilet, both your work and
your knowledge, whenever Microsoft decides to release a new version of VB.

In addition, I suspect that Visual Basic's main virtue, and maybe the only
one, is that it's there. If Microsoft didn't force-fed Visual Basic as the
company's pet scripting language then I don't believe it would even be in
the radar. Alternative scripting languages, such as lua, python and perl,
don't have a monopoly-holding corporation pushing them everywhere and they
still manage to be incomparably more popular than Visual Basic. There is
certainly a good reason for that.


Rui Maciel

On 9/28/2012 7:07 AM, Nick Keighley wrote:
> On Sep 28, 4:56 am, Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
>> BGB <cr88...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 9/27/2012 3:44 AM, Brian wrote:
>>>> I have not found an answer to the question why C++ is the most preferred
>>>> language. I thought it would be a good question to ask in this newsgroup
>>>> that has programmers that have been using C++ for a while.
>>>> I did read that its popular because it can be transferred to other
>>>> platforms but not everyone has more than one platform.
>>
>>> because it sucks less than the other options?...
>>
>>> many people tend to thing of things in terms of being "better" or "more
>>> preferable" (like there is some significant "good" that pulls people to a
>>> particular solution), but I suspect this may be backwards.
>>
>>> I suspect, instead, people tend to avoid serious drawbacks, and the
>>> option the with least serious drawbacks wins by default.
>>
>>> historically, both C and C++ have been in a fairly good spot here.
>>> this may be partly due to being reasonably free of crippling design flaws
>>> (or, at least real design flaws, as opposed to people complaining that it
>>> doesn't really follow idiom-X or fad-Y or prevents bad-practice-Z).
>>
>>> whereas, many other languages have had maybe a few nifty features, but
>>> often at the cost of being seriously crippled or broken in some other
>>> area (often denied, downplayed, or claimed to actually be a feature, by
>>> people who endorse the language...).
>>
>>> usually, this is not about idioms, but rather, things which impede using
>>> the language in one way or another (such as awkward or unreadable syntax,
>>> broken semantics, ...), or limit its effectiveness at performing an
>>> operation (such as arbitrary limitations, poor performance, tendency to
>>> misbehave or be overly difficult to debug, ...).
>>
>>> so, most people largely end up using what works...
>>
>>> though, this is not to say it is perfect either, for that matter...
>>
>> Delphi use to be popular because it had a good structure when writing code.
>> I have programmed in Visual Basic but after a while the structure starts to
>> look untidy with too many programming words and so the program flow can be
>> difficult to see. So I'm looking at other programming languages and notice
>> that many seem to follow C with the curly brackets etc.
>> If I were to ask software companies what language the program they are
>> selling in written in then I have a feeling the answer would be either C or
>> C++.
>
> yes but that's just a feeling. Complex products are often programmed
> in a variety of languages. Languages like Python and Ruby are quick to
> develop in but sometimes run rather sluggishly. C++ can be used in the
> important bits to make everything go faster. Java is pretty popular as
> is C#. Though you might see them as having a C-like syntax.
>

yeah.

multi-language projects are common, and people don't usually like being
tied to a particular target OS.

my own project is composed presently mostly of C (first-place), C++ (2nd
place), and BGBScript (3rd place), with the latter being a custom
language loosely based on JavaScript and ActionScript 3.0 (and mostly
follows ECMA-262, but currently it differs mostly on minor things).

(yes, the BGBScript VM is itself roughly 700,000 lines of mostly C...
the languages' main feature though is mostly that it has a "better than
usual" C FFI, I partly took the C++ ' extern "C" ' mechanism more as a
model for how an FFI should behave, although the actual mechanisms are a
bit different).


but, yes, JavaScript and ActionScript can also be seen as having a
C-like syntax.

I suspect this syntax style is fairly mainstream at this point.

and the syntax is basically less constraining than a line-oriented
syntax. the ever popular ';' mostly serving to indicate the end of a
statement, though languages like JS and friends make it optional, being
able to interpret either ';' or a linebreak as the end of a statement,
but ';' is usually still used as a matter of convention.


>> There are many programming languages to chose from but for some reason
>> people seem to chose C++ maybe its the language that's taught in schools.

at least for myself, I learned C and C++ on my own.

I actually learned QBasic originally (on my own), but then learned
assembler, and originally moved into C land by working backwards from
the ASM output to figure out better how the source language worked.

the move was mostly because I ran into a "glass ceiling" with QBasic,
and so went on to a language which could "actually do stuff".

I went to colleges (many years later), but they were mostly using VB and
C# and similar. (can't say I "learned" much from college classes,
although I was originally exposed to JS via such a class, which was
mostly a class for HTML using it for interactive web-forms, so it wasn't
all bad...). (but, yes, all of this was many years ago now...).

or such...

On 9/28/2012 7:10 AM, Nick Keighley wrote:
> On Sep 28, 5:17 am, Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
>> Paavo Helde <myfirstn...@osa.pri.ee> wrote:
>>> Rui Maciel <rui.mac...@gmail.com> wrote in
>>> news:k425g6$hvo$:
>>
>>>> Paavo Helde wrote:
>>
>>>>> It isn't. Some other languages like C, Java and Objective-C are more
>>>>> popular. See
>>>>> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/conte...pci/index.html
>>
>>>> Again with this TIOBE nonsense. Using the tiobe index to base any
>>>> claim on the popularity of a programming language makes as much sense
>>>> as searching for the name of a programming language on youtube, and
>>>> claiming that it is more popular than another because the search
>>>> returned more hits. Because that's precisely how the the people
>>>> behind TIOBE rank programming languages.
>>
>>> Yeah, I brought up TIOBE as it looked like an exact match for the OP-s
>>> weird claim ("C++ is the most preferred language"). All this popularity
>>> stuff is quite meaningless anyway, so counting hits is no worse or better
>>> than any other method IMO. PHP is very popular, it does not mean that it
>>> would be a good idea to write my image analysis code in PHP.
>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Paavo
>>
>> Most of those surveys seem to have C++ at or near the top of the list.
>> To put it another way why should C++ be more popular than Visual Basic as
>> Visual Basic is easy to learn and there is less code to write?
>
> only until you start doing real work (ie. non-GUI). As poited out
> before Visual Basic is totally tied to Windows.
>

yeah, and the pointy-clicky Windows-specific GUI-building stuff is also
available for other languages as well, like C#, and C++.

this means, if they want, they can still do the front-end with
pointy-clicky, and choose a language that "actually works" for writing
the program logic.

granted, for my personal uses I haven't seen much reason to be tied to
Windows for sake of point-and-click GUI building, but understandably it
is a bit more convenient than building UIs via OpenGL, which is more
often how I have ended up doing it...

On 9/28/2012 7:10 AM, Nick Keighley wrote:
> On Sep 28, 4:56 am, Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
>> Paavo Helde <myfirstn...@osa.pri.ee> wrote:
>>> Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote in news:792154042370428054.785525bclark-
>>> es.co...@free.teranews.com:
>>
>>>> I have not found an answer to the question why C++ is the most preferred
>>>> language.
>>
>>> It isn't. Some other languages like C, Java and Objective-C are more
>>> popular. See
>>> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/conte...pci/index.html
>>
>>> In principle, one should choose the language according to the problem what
>>> one is trying to resolve. If one is planning to do a multi-million line
>>> complex and fast system, C++ is a good candidate (along with Ada and some
>>> others). OTOH, a hundred line program can be written in anything.
>>
>> In that case what is Visual Basic useful for?
>
> GUI heavy Windows apps
>

and where people don't feel like just using Visual Studio to spit out
gobs of C++ (using MFC), or C++/CLI code (using WinForms), and go from
there...

in either case, it is rapid pointy-clicky building of Windows-specific
GUI apps.

On Friday, September 28, 2012 8:56:06 AM UTC-5, Scott Lurndal
wrote:

>
>
> A few years ago, some surveys indicated that about 50% of the enterprise
>
> code was still written in COBOL. The standard has progressed through
>
> COBOL68, COBOL74, COBOL85 and COBOL2004, and the next standard should be available
>
> in a couple of years.

On Dice
http://dice.com
I found six hundred and some jobs when searching
for Cobol. There were over six thousand jobs when
searching for C++.

I used to know of some using Cobol, but today
I can't think of anyone who uses it.

Brian
Ebenezer Enterprises
http://webEbenezer.net

On 9/27/2012 10:56 PM, Brian wrote:
> Nick Keighley <> wrote:
>> On Sep 27, 9:44 am, Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
>>
>>> I have not found an answer to the question why C++ is the most preferred
>>> language. I thought it would be a good question to ask in this newsgroup
>>> that has programmers that have been using C++ for a while.
>>> I did read that its popular because it can be transferred to other
>>> platforms but not everyone has more than one platform.
>>
>> to some extent its momentum, it's popular because it's popular. It's
>> apparent similarity to C probably has some historical significance. As
>> others have noted efficiency and access to the underlying machine is
>> important.
>>
>> I'm curious, why do you care?
>
> I ask myself why should people program in C++ when Visual Basic is easier
> to understand?
> There must be a reason why C++ is chosen when there are many other
> languages to chose from.
> Maybe some people grow up with C and then moved on to C++ and its close to
> what they had used in the past.

Try a large project in Visual Basic. Our software
products have about 800,000 lines of C++ and 600,000
lines of F77. The C++ is the most maintainable and
reliable code.

Lynn

On 9/28/2012 8:31 AM, Bart Vandewoestyne wrote:
> On Thursday, September 27, 2012 6:12:12 PM UTC+2, (unknown) wrote:
>>
>> 2) My favorite reason is: because C++ is *alive* ! I don't know no other
>> language that has changed so much over time.
>
> I do. It's definitely not my intention to be a troll and start a programming language war here, but don't forget Fortran with its different revisions: FORTRAN77, Fortran 90/95, Fortran 2003,...
>
> During my PhD I've been programming for 5 years in Fortran 95. For the scientific work that I needed to to, it just rocked!
>
> Now I switched to industry and I am learning C++ for about one year. It's also an interesting journey... lots of stuff to learn!
>
> What language do I prefer? None. I just pick the right tool for the right job!
>
> Regards,
> Bart

It is very difficult to get old F77 code to work
properly in the new Fortran compilers. C++ does
not have the same problem.

Lynn

On 28/09/2012 09:10, Nick Keighley wrote:
> On Sep 28, 5:17 am, Brian<bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
>> Paavo Helde<myfirstn...@osa.pri.ee> wrote:
>>> Rui Maciel<rui.mac...@gmail.com> wrote in
>>> news:k425g6$hvo$:
>>
>>>> Paavo Helde wrote:
>>
>>>>> It isn't. Some other languages like C, Java and Objective-C are more
>>>>> popular. See
>>>>> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/conte...pci/index.html
>>
>>>> Again with this TIOBE nonsense. Using the tiobe index to base any
>>>> claim on the popularity of a programming language makes as much sense
>>>> as searching for the name of a programming language on youtube, and
>>>> claiming that it is more popular than another because the search
>>>> returned more hits. Because that's precisely how the the people
>>>> behind TIOBE rank programming languages.
>>
>>> Yeah, I brought up TIOBE as it looked like an exact match for the OP-s
>>> weird claim ("C++ is the most preferred language"). All this popularity
>>> stuff is quite meaningless anyway, so counting hits is no worse or better
>>> than any other method IMO. PHP is very popular, it does not mean that it
>>> would be a good idea to write my image analysis code in PHP.
>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Paavo
>>
>> Most of those surveys seem to have C++ at or near the top of the list.
>> To put it another way why should C++ be more popular than Visual Basic as
>> Visual Basic is easy to learn and there is less code to write?
>
> only until you start doing real work (ie. non-GUI). As poited out
> before Visual Basic is totally tied to Windows.

.... and (very important) it's a proprietary language.


--
Cholo Lennon
Bs.As.
ARG