A comment on programming languages

[chipotle]

On Slashdot, someone wrote, "I would feel pretty stupid actually reading a QBASIC book in 2003. Modern programming languages are easier to learn than QBASIC." To which the reply was:

By what reckoning? They turn this:

PRINT A +  B

into this:

am = new math.ArithmeticManager();
opA = new math.Operand((float) a);
opB = new math.Operand((float) b);
am.addOperand(opA);
am.addOperand(opB);
am.operator = new math.operators.Addition();
am.executeMathOperation();
system.io.output.print(am.mathOperationResult());

You know, he has a point.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I can believe it. I haven't ever been even peripherally involved with Windows programming (There is the first place I've worked at that's actually doing Windows software), but I've seen PHP and C at NetPoodles which was somewhat cringe-inducing. Mostly that came from the realization that to a lot of the past and present coders there, "code reuse" meant "copy and paste." When they pasted in comments from entirely different parts of the system, it made things entertaining. Since I mostly spent time fixing and refactoring old code, I mostly complained about the lack of debugging going on there, though. (Naturally when they decided to lay off 2 out of 3 "front end" developers, the one they kept was the one who was the most likely to copy and paste and the most likely to fix bugs by adding a hack correction at the UI level rather than finding the bug at the core. I suspect he appeared to be the most productive by line count.)

For better or worse, I'm ignorant of C++, and I'm wondering if learning Objective-C will ruin me for it later. :)