Josh Lawrence wrote: > hi Erik, I'm glad you asked this question...I've always felt like a > sub-par Linux user because I could not program. I've also noticed > that a lot of programs I've run across in my limited experience with > Linux are written in C. therefore, learning C could only help my > understanding of my computer. This is an interesting point. Yes, the vast majority of the small useful utilities that run on a Linux machine have historically been written in C. In addition, OS kernels, device drivers and speed critical tasks are usually written in C. That means that any professional programmer or dilligent amateur programmer should know C. However, for the small user space utilities, C is not the only game in town. As part of my day job I ocassionally write similar small utilities to run on our kiosk style linux systems. However, I rarely write these utilities in C; C is way too flawed and unsafe a language. Instead, I write these utilities in strict statically typed functional languages like Ocaml and (more recently) Haskell. These languages are higher level so I don't have to worry about things like memory allocation and buffer overflows. They also have safe strings which makes string processing far easier than in C or C++. The standard libraries of these languages have simple, easy and guaranteed safe handling of high level data structures like lists and dictionaries so I don't have the write them from scratch. However, most of the features above are also shared by languages such as Ruby and Python. The big difference is that Ocaml and Haskell programs compile to native binaries (like C and C++) and that the compilers for these languages have a much more strict type checkers (ie they find coding errors) than C or C++. This means that many classes of bugs are found at compile time rather than at run time like they would be for Ruby/Python/etc. The native binaries produced from Ocaml and Haskell programs also tend to run siginificantly faster than byte code interpretted programs written in Ruby/Python/etc. > also, I've noticed that at my local school most of the computer > science majors use C, so I figure that if I learn C, I can at least > understand that course material on some level. As you might guess from what I've written in this thread, I am quite interested in programming langauge research. From what I have seen of this feild, the vast majority of programming language centered computer science research (ie PhD research and papers in reviewed journals) is done around Haskell and to a lesser extent Ocaml. In summary, since your interest seems to be in improving your knowledge about Linux and how your machine works, C is definitely the language to look at. However, C has many traps, requires strict attention to detail and can be rather unforgiving. Higher level langauges like Python, Ruby, Ocaml and Haskell allow you to concentrate more on the problem than on the details. Good luck. Cheers, Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
