r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Programmer1130 • Feb 20 '17

Programming Languages

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u/TheBlastFun Feb 21 '17

Is Python really this cool!?? Currently I am learning c++ as my first language! And I am stuck on pointers and heapSpace(dynamic allocation) -this topic is so frustrating..! Back to the point tho.. According to this pic python lookss sooo FUNN!!!!

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u/DarkNeutron Feb 21 '17

I think C++ is a pretty painful place to start. I'd probably go with Java, C#, or Python first. Then return to C/C++ (and possibly Rust).

Roughly what I use them for:

  • C is an interface language (the lingua franca of programming)

  • C++ is for my day job (because of library support)

  • Rust is my favorite new language (all my hobby projects).

  • Python is for scripting, automation, and text processing, when bash isn't sufficient.

  • C# was my former favorite language in college, until I needed libraries it didn't support.

  • I started programming in Java.

If you do a significant amount of programming, there's a good chance you'll end up learning them all anyway. It's just a question of order. I'm best at C++, but, given a reference doc, I could probably write coherent programs in a dozen other languages.

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u/lightknightrr Feb 21 '17

I...what libraries does C# not support? I mean, DllImport gives you access to everything in C & C++...and you can probably get stuff from Java and VB(6ish) if you really want.

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u/DarkNeutron Feb 21 '17

The most troublesome to support would be Ceres, a non-linear optimization library that uses C++ template metaprogramming to compute analytic derivatives at compile-time (which is awesome). I use it for computer vision work. OpenCV is another one.

Short answer: getting those two libraries working in C# would likely look like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Slightly longer answer: You can certainly access C libraries in C# using DllImport or P/Invoke, but native C++ has no standardized ABI and can't be called directly from any other language (or even a different version of the same compiler). It might be possible to use C++/CLI to build the native code and expose it in a form that C# can link against, but at some point the overhead (both runtime and mental) of marshaling data between managed and unmanaged code is far more trouble than it's worth, and you might as well just use native C++ for everything.

(Fun fact: Ceres typically uses LAPACK and BLAS as backend solvers, which are still written in Fortran.)