Thursday, September 02, 2004

Rusty with an accent

My current computer programming language of choice is Java. This has changed over the years. I've been working with Java for about 8 years. Prior to that I worked with C++ for about 5 years. As a sojourn in the middle of the Java years I worked with the C language, but my emphasis remained Java. This was unusual, because most people go from C to C++, whereas I did the reverse. But it was required by the job and I adapted. Today at work I had to develop a small C program to recreate a problem we were having. Writing it was tough, because I was rusty. It's been years since I've written in C. So it took me a while, but I got it done. Yet after completing it I had a bug. I had written some of it as if I were writing Java, which was wrong. I've done this before, and I've also read programs by other people that have "an accent". What I mean is that the author's primary language is something other than the one that the program is written in, and it clearly shows that. For example, in C you must declare all variables first, that is, before you use them. Whereas in Java you can declare them inline as you need them. So if you read a Java program where all the variables are declared first, you can easily see the "C" accent.

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