John Larkin said:
You have to realize that guys like Jim and I are fulltime circuit
designers. We have an infinite, unlearnable amount of stuff to keep up
with in our own field, and all the work we can handle, often more. If
we do want to write a program to do some math, we need to do it
quickly, without spending a couple years getting up to speed in .NET
and C++ classes and stuff like that. We're solving math problems, so
user interface isn't important. The only eye candy that's really
useful to us is graphing data so we can get a feel for the dynamics of
a system, and even then we can dump a comma-delimited file to a
grapher program. Some of the stuff I do is very compute intensive, so
a pig like Visual Basic would be unusable. So what we need is a
simple, quick, easy to learn and easy to use language that runs fast.
And, at least for me, can do hardware i/o without requiring me to
write device drivers.
This sounds a lot like Borland Pascal.
It is a compiled language so it runs fast. The DOS IDE that came with it
is simple to use and easy to learn but very powerful and has a good
editor. Range checking is good for making sure you don't end up with a
nonsense result. Hardware I/O is easy to do. You can use 80 bit
"extended" variables to gain speed and accuracy in the results (no
rounding build up). It is not case sensitive so you don't need to be
quite as careful when typing.
example: (that actually does something)
{ <-- this is a comment --> }
var
q, p, r : extended; { Make my variables }
i : integer; { The usual loop counter }
{remember := is needed to assign }
begin
write('Q = '); readln(q); { Read in the values }
write('P = '); readln(p);
p := abs(p); { The sign doesn't matter }
q := abs(q);
if (p=0) and (q=0) then halt; { Don't use silly values }
if p<q then begin { p must be the bigger component.
r := p; p := q; q := r;
end;
if q<>0.0 then begin
for i := 1 to 10 do begin
r := q/p;
r := r*r;
r := r/(4+r);
p := p + 2*r*p;
q := q*r;
end;
end;
writeln('The radius is ',p);
end.
[....]
If I wanted to spend serious hours learning a new computer skill, it
would be learning Linux.
Get a good install disk, install it on a computer and use Open-Office.
You are at that point offically using Linux. Then you can learn things as
needed.
