Computer programming

Post Reply New Topic

I like to program using Basic and now I am starting to use a little C++.
In college, we have a class in which we use Maple, so I am wondering if any of you use it ?

Loy

I have never used Maple, but I do use MATLAB. Well actually, we just quit learning about MATLAB and have moved to Java as part of a course I am taking called computing for engineers. MATLAB is great because its syntax is extremely simplified and I found it very easy to use. Java is pretty good too, but its syntax is much more complicated than MATLAB's.

I used Maple in my MATH 311 class, but that was 3 years ago.

Never tried Maple. May I suggest Python? It's a simple, but powerful language - you can do OOP and functional programming in it. It's really kewl. NASA and Google and ILM and all sorts of places use it cuz it's powerful, but it's also very elegant and simple to use.

I agree. Python is my favorite computer language. I used it to write all the CGI scripts on the dorm website.

I mainly programme in java and C. I think I would like to learn python, if anyone could recommend any books or sites that teach it I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Python is great for scripting, I learned it from these two websites:

http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html
http://diveintopython.org/toc/

Dive into Python is great. The dead tree version came out this past year too. I got to be tech reviewer on it. (yay! Getting paid to read is the most *aweome* thing!)

Another really good one for folks who are new:
Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, by Mike Dawkins (or is it Dawson. I always mess up his last name)

It's a great book - game-oriented, and intended for raw beginners, but not condescending at all. Very practical.

Cool! Thanks to both of you, I will definitely check it out!

We got the final draft to the publisher today. The 2nd edition of the Python Cookbook is going to be published in March (in time for PyCon) and I'm one of the co-authors.

I've done quite a bit of programming in PHP for various web applications... I love how it's HTML-embedded so you can stick the returned values of PHP scripts right there in the midst of ordinary HTML. Makes it a lot easier to integrate the site design and backend, as far as I'm concerned... none of those clumsy escape codes in the HTML.

I also do quite a bit of Java programming-- that's the main language I use for college programming competitions and class programming assignments. I do wish they'd allow Perl or Python for those, though.

And of course, I was raised on old-school Microsoft BASIC.

But they get replaced by something even clumsier: Dollar signs everywhere. And worse, if you forget one, it's not an error, so your script just silently does the wrong thing.

Not that Perl's any better in that respect-- with its multiple sigils for variables, it's actually a bit worse!

Python, however, does solve that problem quite elegantly. I've been learning Python recently, and it's quite a neat language.

I'm a bit-banging control freak. ASM on a microcontroller is my code of choice.
When I can't do that, I use C/C++. For quick hacks and prototyping, I like VB. Started playing with Python last year but wasn't motivated enough to do much more than a few test apps with it. Nowadays I don't do much programming though...

I can't help but chuckle at this thread. If this was the 1970's, this conversation would have taken place in someones living room over an episode of "Happy Days", and instead of talking about perl, PHP, variable types, and C++, we would all be talking about assembler, and how the 8k of ram in the companys PDP computer is simply not enough to make it do what the boss wants, or how it took 14 times and most of the day to get that tape drive software coded properly.