Knowing when you need dynamic vs static allocations, and knowing when to use pointers, etc can be painful for first time programmers.

Typically the "you're done with it, you free it" part where things get tricky

Memory management in C is hard, and very easy to get wrong. That's why there are tons of tools designed to do nothing else but watch for memory leaks, accessing freed memory, danging pointers, etc..

Yeah, malloc, pointers, casting to pointers and dereferencing them, etc, can get pretty crazy. I should know with my swiss-cheese-of-a-CAS failing to free things all over the place (not gCAS2).

I recommend using valgrind to monitor the memory, but that's just me.

Eh, I feel like you just need to be organized about it, but I'll agree that it's highly non-trivial.

Indeed, I think that valgrind is the tool of choice for such things.

I think that if you want to pursue a career in programming you should go for Java and perl. The other languages are not used much anymore unless you are just looking for a hobby. I know this from professionals who make a good living at what they do. I personally like all of them and think that all of them have room for exploration and advancement. Ti-Basic makes my wife worry about me. lol I want to play. I have decided that I am going to work possibly with perl, and Java to see what I can come up with.

that's very not true:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
While this isn't necessarily definitive, I'm in the industry and can tell you Java and Perl aren't the only languages used much professionally.

Nobody uses Perl these days. Anyone who chooses to use Perl is a masochist, and you should stay *far* away from them. They should be mocked endlessly, as well, for they are not human. They do not have a soul.

Haha You are wrong about that. Amazon.com, Yahoo and many more use perl as well as many others. It is still evolving and maturing somewhat, with many uses. Many people still use it. It may not be as good as some for what you want to use it for but, it is a good place to start and administrative programmers still use it all the time.

Uh, no, no they definitely do not. No idea where you heard that, but it is completely wrong.

Perl has zero uses. Again, stay *FAR* away from it. It is a horrible language and there is always a superior choice. Or at least Perl 5 and below are (the only ones anyone has ever used). Perl 6 supposedly fixes many of the issues, but no one cares anymore because Perl sucks.

As for "evolving and maturing", not really. Perl 6 began 11 *years* ago and still hasn't been released. Perl is dead.

Also, just as a point that I'm sure you already know, Basicman, the views of Kllrnohj do not necessarily reflect the views of Cemetech. To quote Kerm, because I couldn't find a better way to do so:

To further the thoughts on this topic, I don't believe I've heard of anyone using Perl for web development, any more. I have, recently, used a build script written in Perl to build msp430-gcc, and was somewhat surprised to find that I had Perl installed.

Two years ago, this was posted, which cites a source from about five years ago.

Also, if memory serves, the way things are worded are pretty important. So, Amazon.com & other sites don't use Java, Perl, PHP, C++ and other languages? I'm pretty sure they do use multiple langauges as well; if not excluding some, may they be Perl and/or others.

I think that you are very right about that. They are not the only langauges used and to make the best of a career it would be nice if one is well rounded in many langauges. I was a little bold when I named only 2. What langauge you choose depends on many things. Good link!

Funnily enough, Cemetech itself originally had all its major scripts written in Perl. Our webhost supported Perl, and not PHP, so the download counter, archives, cron jobs, and a host of other components were all in Perl. In a way I'm very happy that was the case, because it forced me to learn Perl, definitely a good skill to have.

ticalc.org uses a lot of Perl. Of course, though, ticalc.org is still stuck in the '90s.

Legacy code - nobody writes *NEW* code in Perl. Complete waste of time to learn it except as maybe a 4th or 5th language, and only then only out of morbid curiosity.



Yes, words *and context* are very important - so why are you ignoring them? How does me saying people don't use Perl translate to Amazon & others not using Java, PHP, C++, and other languages? Seriously, wtf?

I've never once used Perl for a client. I've never even seen Perl code professionally. Java is, indeed, quite popular, but saying that other languages are only used as a hobby makes you an idiot. PHP and .NET are everywhere you look.



Ah, I see you changed your mind. Good. And if you're pursuing a career in programming, it doesn't matter what languages you know. What matters is that you're a good programmer and know how to solve problems. It's assumed by the employer that you will be able to pick up a new language in a very small amount of time.

That said, it's a waste of time to learn Perl.

To the OP, you should really only concern yourself with Java or Python. C# would be the best bet, but only if you had Windows. Java is very widely used and has more than enough power to handle anything you would want to work on. Python is probably a little easier to pick up but not as widely used. The documentation on it is excellent, but you'll find more help/examples in the Java community.

Just, whatever you do, stay away from C/C++. The memory management will be over your head. It goes over everyone's head at first. Wait until you have more experience under your belt before tackling those.

Or any other OS, really.

Eh, I'd rather script in something I can run natively on Linux over C#, but that's mainly because I'm not a C# maven like Shaun or Benryves.

Although in order to learn the skills needed to quickly pick up new languages, it's invaluable to have a lot of languages under your belt, because after awhile you see all the different similarities between the languages, and it just comes down to learning the differences and particular syntax of a new language, in my opinion.

I don't agree with that; it's a great Bash scripting tool, it's close to both Bash and PHP, and it's gotten me out of not a few CLI pickles.

Yeah but what if you're not scripting, and instead developing a real program? Of course, many people script in Python or Perl, which do not run natively on Linux, so it's not like doing "mono Program.exe" is terrible different from "python script.py". In any case, if you're wanting to learn languages that are useful for the industry, C# is a good one to get some exposure to. And you can do it on Windows or Linux. See MonoDevelop for a nice IDE for Linux.

Fair deal, I guess the distinction between interpreted and compiled languages is an important one to be made in this particular topic. One of these days you're going to have to force me to do some C# for real, Shaun.