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newbie question about programming languages
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<blockquote data-quote="raydot" data-source="post: 623740" data-attributes="member: 51841"><p>Here's the difference: all of the languages are derivatives of the C programming language, which was invented by Bell Labs (yes, the phone company) in the 1980's. </p><p></p><p><a href="http://www.oreilly.com/news/languageposter_0504.html" target="_blank">http://www.oreilly.com/news/languageposter_0504.html</a></p><p></p><p>The primary successor to C is C++, which adds the object-oriented paradigm of Smalltalk into C, giving programmers the ability to work with objects and classes. I could write for three days about what "object-oriented" means, but suffice to say it's both a way to programming, and a way to think about programming. I think <a href="http://www.eckelobjects.com" target="_blank">Bruce Eckel</a> writes some great (and free) books about C++, but they do assume you already know C.</p><p></p><p>So C and C++ are the "standards" of this group of languages, and are some of the most widely used programming languages in the world. There is such a thing as the ANSI C standard, and if you have an "ANSI compliant" C compiler (like gcc, which is what XCode uses to compile) then your programs adhere to the standard.</p><p></p><p>There are spinoffs of these, instituted for one reason or another. For instance, C# is Microsoft's version of C++, developed to pull programmers even more deeply into Microsoft's web (C# doesn't work on anything but Windows, while C++ works on pretty much every platform -- hence why another user called it a "rip-off"). Objective-C is the one Apple uses, for whatever reason, although Apple didn't develop it. My guess is that, like most things of this ilk, it's used because they used it at NeXt.</p><p></p><p>When you ask, "where should I start," I think an important follow-up is "what do you want to do?" There's a pretty big difference between, say, graphics programming, games programming, and application programming.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="raydot, post: 623740, member: 51841"] Here's the difference: all of the languages are derivatives of the C programming language, which was invented by Bell Labs (yes, the phone company) in the 1980's. [url]http://www.oreilly.com/news/languageposter_0504.html[/url] The primary successor to C is C++, which adds the object-oriented paradigm of Smalltalk into C, giving programmers the ability to work with objects and classes. I could write for three days about what "object-oriented" means, but suffice to say it's both a way to programming, and a way to think about programming. I think [URL="http://www.eckelobjects.com"]Bruce Eckel[/URL] writes some great (and free) books about C++, but they do assume you already know C. So C and C++ are the "standards" of this group of languages, and are some of the most widely used programming languages in the world. There is such a thing as the ANSI C standard, and if you have an "ANSI compliant" C compiler (like gcc, which is what XCode uses to compile) then your programs adhere to the standard. There are spinoffs of these, instituted for one reason or another. For instance, C# is Microsoft's version of C++, developed to pull programmers even more deeply into Microsoft's web (C# doesn't work on anything but Windows, while C++ works on pretty much every platform -- hence why another user called it a "rip-off"). Objective-C is the one Apple uses, for whatever reason, although Apple didn't develop it. My guess is that, like most things of this ilk, it's used because they used it at NeXt. When you ask, "where should I start," I think an important follow-up is "what do you want to do?" There's a pretty big difference between, say, graphics programming, games programming, and application programming. [/QUOTE]
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