should i learn it first ?

[G. Sumner Hayes]

In article <NAmi8.54548$xG.5157 at news2.bloor.is>, Qiang.JL wrote:
> I am a student who have learned perl,java and other like data structure
> stuff. Now i want to take some further step to learn one or two languages to
> improve my language view. There are two languages are on the list: python
> and C++

You say C++ here, but later you say C/C++.  C and C++ are different
languages.  IMO, C is worth learning simply because it's a very
low-level language (relative to the others you know) and lots of
interesting software (e.g.perl, java, and python) is implemented in
C.  It'll also expose you to explicit memory management, pointers, etc.
and to a procedural programming style.

In my daily work, I do 90% of my coding in Python, occasionally dropping
down to C when necessary, and occasionally using another language.  While
C++ was the first language I learned, I basically never use it.

At any rate, learn plain C before you learn C++ and consider strongly
whether or not you need C++ at all (this will be partially platform
driven).  I'd say to learn Python first, but it really depends on what
you want to do with the language.

> How many language do you think one should _master_? I think one or two is
> enough.learning others are letting you to learn the language concept and
> structure etc certainly helpful.

I think a good progammer should master at least one statically typed
functional language (ocaml is my preference, other examples are ML,
Haskell), one high-level dynamic language (Python, or Ruby, Smalltalk,
etc) and C for pragmatic reasons.  That gives some exposure to many
different kinds of programming.  

After that, Lisp, Prolog, and eiffel are worth a look (not necessarily
master) from a mind-expansion POV (and some assembly language) and from
a pragmatic POV Perl, Java, and C++ (on Windows) or Objective C (on Mac)
or the Unix scripting environment (awk, sed, [k]sh, etc) on Unix.

  Sumner
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