RE: Jumpstart a programming ability
Time to chime in from the C/C++ camp! :-)
I am not knocking Perl or JavaScript or any of the other scripting languages. For technical writers, these are probably more widely used, and therefore useful for the majority of end user and especially web-based apps.
HOWEVER <grin>.... Knowledge of a low-level programming language like C/C++ gives you, as a writer, a solid grounding in programming languages in general. It's like seeing the structure of the house the clapboard and paint. I have found that the coursework I did in C/C++ has made learning subsequent languages like Java that much easier.
Yep. I'd agree. Learning perl will teach you to hack, not program a "real" programming language. It's really very helpful to know perl -- it does great things. In fact, my knowledge of perl just helped me make up some great regular expressions to fix my webworks template. ;) It's also helped me make lists of bugs from our bug database and make nice reports of them for my own use.
But it's a totally different kettle of beans from learning C or C++, and it won't really help you learn or understand them very much.
On a side note, as programming languages go, I really like Javascript. It's easy to pick up if you know another language. I also think it's easier than C or C++, so it might be a good stepping stone like Pascal used to be (but there's no point in learning that these days!)
-Katie
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