First post of winter quarter

[vulture23]

Winter quarter is off to a fairly good start. Have assignments due next week in all three of my classes, of course, but none of them seems particularly onerous. All three classes promise to be fairly interesting, too (though also a lot of work

Comments

[vulture23]

In this case, ML == SML, Standard ML '97 (New Jersey), not machine language. ML is a statically typed functional language. The class will also cover Scheme and (as an experimental change from Smalltalk) Ruby.

Using assembly doesn't come in until (scheduling permitting) next quarter, when I take "machine architecture". I have, however, poked around with a bit of x86 assembly before. (Back in the pre-Win95 days, when doing graphics meant either using a 3rd-party library or directly writing to the video card ports using inline assembly...) It is, as you say, interesting to see how things work on that level (and this is what interests me about the digital logic class, too), but I expect that I'll continue to prefer to use higher level languages too. :)

I haven't looked at C# as of yet. I'd sort of categorized it as "cheap MS ripoff of Java, must be even worse than the original" and written it off... but I've heard several people now saying that it seems to be better-designed than Java is. So maybe I'll peek at it sometime. (On the other hand, as far as I can see, the only practical reason to use Java instead of Python is that Java runs inside all standard web browsers... so I'm not sure what C# might offer that Python doesn't...)

[stolen_tea]

Yeah, I'll second that about liking C# better than Java, too.

And one of the coolest things about it is that by default, it'll compile down to "Intermediate Language", which is the equivalent of Java bytecode, except that all sorts of other languages also compile down into IL. There's a compiler for Python, for instance. So you can write in Python, compile to IL, and link it with other IL libraries, which could be written in entirely different languages. It's a very nifty layer of abstraction. :)

[3smallishmagi]

Java was the only language I went to a whole course for (I gatecrashed an undergrad course) and I loathe it. Miserably awkward, slow, and a 'runs nowhere' environment.

C# on the other hand was love at first sight. Doesn't make sense because it's the same sort of language. It's made by Anders Hejlsberg who also made Turbo Pascal (love!) and Delphi (ditto) so maybe it's not surpising.