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Originally Posted by Crash
is that pronounced the wee-er
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No, pronounced wire.
Quote:
Originally Posted by manasecret
So so true, the amount of languages out there is much higher than it should be -- it's not as if any one language is fundamentally doing all that much more than any other language. They're all controlling computers, which at their core are essentially the same thing -- CPU, memory, ROM, I/O. I'd like to see one Grand Theory of Languages, perhaps known as GTL, that supersedes all other languages.
Though, perhaps it's still useful to have the more specialized languages (PHP for instance). But I think GTL could overtake very many languages by incorporating the best of each one without any of their individual problems. Is that possible?
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You can go back to Assembly, which is the most basic you're going to get. The problem then is it becomes very unreadable, which goes back to why we have programming languages in the first place. But the more readable the language is, the less powerful it is. Part of the reason so many languages are used for different things. C++ is a horrible language to learn, but it's not going away anytime soon because it's power is unmatched. In the gaming industry, tools are now being coded on C# because it's faster and easier, but the game itself it still on C++.
PHP is a very easy language to learn, and let's all remember folks, easy = no power! If you use PHP as a base language and try to expand, you'll be getting a lot of headaches. PHP is very generous and allows you to code very sloppy and still run just fine. You can define variables just about anywhere, change their data type without issues, and very rarely do you have problems with scope. It's nice to new programmers, since it allows you to learn about different concepts without being flooded by errors you don't understand.
But every language has its ups and downs. With PHP you fully control the HTML that is outputted. ASP.NET is a better language than PHP hands-down in every possible way, but using web controls, ASP.NET automatically outputs the HTML for you, and it has a lot of problems with it being valid, since Microsoft embeds data into hidden input strings, and has runat="server" attributes, and runat is not valid for anything.