Let's have one...just for fun? We've already discussed programming languages in other threads, I just thought it would be a good idea to collect them all in one thread. So I'm actually trying to prevent flooding rather than causing it.
My viewpoints:
Assembler - No real point in using it anymore for most things. There are some places it should be used, but they are really rare. Modern compilers are sometimes better than humans in optimizing anyway.
Visual Basic - Crappy language. Yes, it does give newbies a headstart, but not really more than Delphi does in my opinion. You can learn it in an hour, make programs in an hour, but after a month you spend more time fighting with the language than programming. Doing something advanced (editing FF files for instance) is not strictly impossible but tiresome.
Delphi - Visual Basic the way it is supposed to be. Almost as powerful as C++ (there's not a thing you can do in C++ that you can't do in Delphi) and as easy to learn as VB. This is my favourite graphical tool: If my program is much about a user interface, I use this.
C++ - The best! The cryptic syntax is bad because it scares newbies away, but is faster to type and has many really powerful features, of which I would mention templates and operator overloading as the greatest. IN Visual Basic some calls (like open) have special treatment, in Delphi some types (like string) have special treatment...in C++ nothing has special treatment, there's nothing in the standard libraries that you couldn't do yourself!! Also I really like the strong typing of the language (compare to Delphi, where you can typecast as easy as TButton(list[1]) and get loads of access violations) and the constness issues. But by now probably only the C++ people out there understand what I'm saying anyway...
MS VC++ - Microsoft manages to do everything possible wrong in their MFC framework. They have esentially stripped away what is beutiful with C++, you have to program directly to the Windows API instead of using some middle-layer like the rest of the world does. I feel it's a bit prehistoric, really... Also, the compiler itself lacks a lot of C++ features (for instance decent template support).
Borland C++Builder - Really horrible. Borland's C++ compiler is one of the best out there but using the Delphi VCL in C++ is just so wrong...C++ is type-safe, Delphi is type-weak...it's two colliding worlds! If you want to program with the fantastic VCL, use Delphi.
Java - It's C++ done right in some cases, and totally wrong in other cases. It's good to get rid of the legacy C/unix/preprocessor stuff, but loosing templates, multiple inheritance and operator overloading isn't all that good...it's a little like Pascal with C++ syntax, meaning blending the bad things of C++ with the bad things of Pascal...but still it's me 3rd language of choice, I'm not really against it. I'm only against the Java hype...most people hyping it don't have a clue. At least in my experience.
Perl - The beauty of this language is said to be the usefulness. As I look on programming as an art in goodprinciples and framework it really isn't what I'm looking for, but then again it doesn't pretend to be. Useful for dirty scripts...
PHP - Probably the best web author tool out there right now, definitely my choice when making dynamic HTML.
That's it...I don't know many more languages and haven't made an opinion about them.
[EDIT:] How could I forget good old C?
C is..well...C. I've never used it. I do know that it is faster than C++ (well, object oriented programming anyway, you can do C++ the C way) because the virtual functions cause the CPU to predict badly what will happen and not run as optimized. So C programming is faster (in two meanings of the word), but probably not as maintainable.
And you can do OO in C, but why bother? It would mean extremely cryptic syntax...
[This message has been edited by dagsverre (edited January 24, 2001).]
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