[Year 12 Its] Re: Naming Conventions

[Con Zymaris]

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 05:43:15PM +1000, Bricks J. Winzer wrote:
> > Java was nowhere near the first to try this seriously.
> 
> > The UCSD Pascal system did essentially everything that Java later 
> > purported to do, but back in 1979: portable language, platform neutral 
> > runtime, threaded bytecode optimised interpreter etc.
> 
> Naturally.
> 
> When UNIX, or should I say UNICS, and its predecessor, MULTICS, were
> being developed in the late 1960s, there was a need to develop a high
> level programming language to build it with.  Pascal was used to write
> a language called B.  This then evolved into a new version: C.


Close, but not quite.

C was derived from B, which was in turn derived from BCPL:

 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

Pascal actually came _after_ Ritcihe created C.

 http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/language/oberon/obhist/history.htm


> 
> During the 1990s, C was used to create the Java langauge.  Java draws

Java derives from C++ not C. 

C++ was originally just C + objects, pushed out by Stroustrup (also at
Bell Labs) in 1986. The first C++ compiler I used in the late 80s was 
CFRONT from Bell, which was just a set of pre-processor macros munged 
before the code was sent to a standard C compiler. 

Full C++ compilers came later; among the first being Walt 
Bright's Zortech C++ 

 http://www.walterbright.com/

Neither Borland nor Microsoft built their own C/C++ compilers. They bought
out Lattice and Wizard C respectively. 

While we're on it, I'm sure you're all aware that Microsoft didn't write
Visual Basic? Alan Cooper of Cooper Software did:

 http://www.johnsmiley.com/visualbasic/vbhistory.htm

Java came from Oak, Gosling's pet project developed at Sun in 1989 to sell 
into the set-top TV market in the US and Japan. It failed in that market. 
The 'Language of the Internet' was merely a marketing afterthought by Sun 
and an opportunistic land-grab. 

ps: Gosling was also parent of the NeWS windowing system, which got its 
butt whupped by the X-Window system in the market in the late 80s, which 
is why he still hates X ;-)

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/26/gosling_on_csharp_why_x/

> very heavily on its parent, and it's natural it still does much what
> its parent did. :)

It does, but with a 200 MB memory footprint for trivial apps. That sucks.

> 
> As a teacher, I know that I'd rather teach students Pascal than C or
> Java.  Is Delphi popular?  I'm personally a VB "enthusiast" but accept
> that it has a lot of shortcomings.

It depends what you want to teach.

VB makes easy things trivial and complex things impossible.

If you want to teach join-the-dots snap-lock prgramming, then VB is fine.  

If you want to do anything more serious - for instance, show me how easy
it is to create linked data srtuctures in VB - then VB is more complex 
than C.

One thing is certain - if all a student knows is VB, they are not taken
seriously as a prgroammer by the professional coding fraternity. They must
show they can scale mentally beyond VB.

Cheers,
 
Con Zymaris, Convenor
Open Source Victoria
http://www.osv.org.au/

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