Forums Developers Open-source C++ IRC bot concerns...

There are competitive products.



Yup, nothing's perfect



Well Joe Average can go and install RedHat or Mandrake

By the way, yesterday I installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 (my first contact with the FreeBSD world). I daresay the installation process was easier than I expected. I daresay it "installed by itself". Of course maybe that's because I've installed a number of OSs till now and it might seem normal. I don't know :P

However, one thing a linux user should know how to do is compile. It's not hard. On most cases it is

$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
password:
$ make install

Still it's not what a user wants to do. I got no problem with it, but Joe Average would. IMHO Linux should never get any easier, just to please Joe Average. Linux wasn't created for Joe Average. If Joe wants to use Linux he should get some fundamental understanding of stuff. Yeah that's a lot to ask I know, but that's just me :P



All of the above except no.2 are true for distros such as RedHat and Mandrake. However the support you get isn't from the ones publishing the distro, but from the ones using it...

thanks

Guys, agreed, however as I said most computer users wouldn't even know what a partition was. Nor do they really care to find out. They use a computer only to perform tasks.

Okay, now can we get done with this Linux/Windows, C/C++/Delphi/Etc. talk in this thread?

Well you actually started it so why don't you take your C++ bot question to a C++ bot forum?

actually my C++ bot question was answered SOME weeks ago and then "vague" bumped this thread saying C++ is not the right language and stuff.

Really, what makes you think you can learn the relative merits of C++ from a C++ book? No, learn CS, and CE. Then learn different languages with different cultures behind them. Learn some (non-exhaustive list) LISP/Scheme, Haskell, ML, Python, Perl, Basic, Ada, Erlang, Self, Prolog... at least. Spend some time reading around comparisons, understand the real abstractions, ideas, and histories which forced the design of all those languages. Then come back. If you really do want my opinion, which you don't. As I said in my inital post, it was just a complaint about the fact that I find the whole state of affairs with why certain languages are more popular very depressing:-/ But I'm really interested in programming languages. Really.

I don't expect you to do all this. But I wish more professional programmers would, because it would certainly lead to a world where C++ wasn't the default choice for just about everything:-/ I wish more people would treat languages as a tool, not religion, and stop saying profoundly stupid things like "I don't like rip-off languages.". Do you think I care, or MS, or Sun (if you think Java was one iota original when released, think again)? The right tool for the job, religious issues aside. For some jobs, C# clearly is the right tool. For your bot? If you want it to run on a *nix box, probably not :-/

C#? Sure, it's just a slightly different Java (in all interesting respects the exact same language). And if you think I'm going to get into something as profoundly _boring_ as a MS/*nix/OS debate, think again:-/

First and foremost Delphi is a RAD tool. It really represents best of both worlds, In that it can be as complicated as you want it to be. The similiarities between Delphi and C# are extensive. The fact you can get IRC components for delphi, Which make childs play out of this task, Make delphi ideal.

Really I don't know why C# would be an automatic choice other than the kind of ignorance you criticized before.

PS. Delphi code can run on *nix too, Ever heared of Kylix.

You said you wanted to learn what C++'s strengths and weaknesses are. A decent book should have all that info. But your way of research is better and bound to give you the _correct_ results.



Good or bad, there always has been, still is and always will be something more popular than the others. It might not always be the best ( *cough* Windows *cough* ) but the majority uses it and many ppl develop apps for it. In the programming world it happens to be one language. It either is C or C++ or Pascal or Delphi or Fortran or Lisp or Prolog or Python or whatever other language you can think of.



Ever heard of "good artists copy; great artists steal..."? But the opposite doesn't always work ("the ones that copy are good artists and the ones that steal are great artists"). I don't think C# is better than Java. Specifically I think only a few M$ products are worth acquiring; but those few ones really ARE worth acquiring. But it's just that they're only a few.



If you have a server that runs Win2k or Win2k3 or any other Windows then I feel sorry for you

The way you feel programming languages, that way I feel for OSs

The way I feel about OSes is just shear boredom, it has nothing to do with any lack of knowledge. That debate is just, well, I haven't seen anything new in a while, at some point you start to recognise a religious debate as one. Micro/Monolithic kernel my behind. I'd chose a *nix server for sheer transparency (wysiwyg), but I really acknowledge people have different needs.

And that the desktop user has different needs altogether. This is a XP box. Why? Because the voice recognition software I _need_ to be able to use any computer for extended periods is only decent enough on Windows. That's it, the other desktops aren't a choice, at all. I could set them up, but I couldn't actually use them. I wish, but I can't. Pragmatics always beat ideals under some circumstances.

Java and C# are so very similar that they could be the same language. But I know the differences, I've read up on the motivations behind them (the developers have a bunch of interesting blogs, I wish the Java developers were as forthcoming), I agree with some, disagree with others, and aren't conclusive on yet other issues. One really isn't objectively better than the other. Same goal, different languages, different tradeoffs. But the C# has a number of years of hindsight to draw on, which has helped some.

And that word, tradeoff, really is important.

And I really don't hate Delphi. But I find Ada more interesting (in the same vein).