Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!imspw6!bob
From: bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ too complex
Message-ID: <192@imspw6.UUCP>
Date: 5 Nov 88 18:40:36 GMT
Organization: IMS Inc., Rockville, MD
Lines: 54




 
Jan Steinman writes:
> 
> (How do you say, "I want the window here, and I want it to display the
>P/E  ratio of the top 50 NASDAQ stocks in a scatter-plot" in Russian?) 
> 
 
One possibility, more or less:
 
"Mne nuzhna okhno zdess, i shto okhno pokazal p/e otnoshennie verkhixh 50
NASDAQixh aktsii razbrosnoy diagrammoy"
 
    I regard Russian as a FAR more complicated logical system than anything
I've seen yet in the way of programming languages or computer science, or
in the realm of mathematics.  When you consider that an entire nation of
some 300,000,000 people actually masters this discipline, mostly as a
SECOND language, and then consider the general level of math and computer
instruction in America, you have to wonder.
 
    By comparison, for instance, it would not seem to be asking very much
to wish all high school graduates to understand mathematics at least
through advanced calculus and differential equations (or to understand
C++).  To me at least, the problem is in attitudes and in the manner in
which things are taught, rather than in any lack of innate learning
abilities amongst the general population.  As a math major in school, I
always had the feeling that 80% of the math texts I ever saw (the ones
which read "theorem/proof, theorem/proof....." from front cover to back
cover) should be burned and their authors hanged and that anything I ever
actually came to understand was via digging on my own part and in spite of
rather than due to such texts or curricula.
 
    The single biggest problem with C++ as I see it is the natural tendency
of C programmers (who always regarded Kernighan and Ritchie's book as the
bible and as their first C book) to want to purchase a copy of Stroustrup's
book as their first C++ book.  Stroustrup's book almost assumes that the
reader KNOWS C++ a priori (the header to the notes starting on page 1 even
says as much) and the book generally becomes more valuable and readable
after one has basically figured out C++.  A far better way to LEARN C++
would be a copy of the Pinson/Weiner book along with a copy of Zortech's
DOS C++ compiler.  Zortech vers 1.6 (which they are shipping now as a final
free upgrade) compiles and runs everything in Stroustrup's book as well as
everything (including the polymorphic examples) in the Pinson/Weiner book.
 
    C++ strikes me as manifestly WORTH learning;  it strikes me as a single
language which can damned near do everything, exactly the language which
Ada was supposed to be but never will be.
 
Ted Holden
HTE