[Edu-sig] C vs Java

[Terry Hancock]

On Tuesday 13 April 2004 12:24 am, arkamir at softhome.net wrote:
>   Ive been sitting in the sidelines of this mailing list for some timenow, 
> and I know this has probably been asked but I was wondering whichone would 
> be more adventagous to learn out of C and Java. I am afreshman in 
> highschool, and am profecient in Python. I know there are awhole slew of 
> other languages out there, but I am researching intobuilding a robot as a 
> tool for learning a low level language, and thoseare the only languages 
> supported. I've heard a lot about how C is deadand Java's open source 
> compiler/libs lacking. Learning see C would begood for kernel hacking if i 
> ever get into it, but I'm most likely goingto have to learn Java for my AP 
> tests anyways. 

I would definitely not call C "dead" -- especially for embedded programming,
like you describe.  I would expect Java to be a bit of a problem in robotics,
though I'm not sure what can be done with JIT compilers nowadays.  If I were
going to do robotics programming, I would probably write C low-level driver
libraries and do the high-level programming in Python.

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com