Chris' Programming Pages

Java

It's pretty clear to most at this point that GUI applications rule supreme for the popular majority of computing devices. It's also pretty clear that OOP has been embraced by the software development community at large. Java appears to be at the doorstep of taking on really major importance.

By the way, the American pronunciation of the word "Java" is one of my pet peeves. It sounds kinda silly, really (as does "Mazda", but I digress). Since Java was developed at an American company -- SUN Microsystems -- I suppose they say it correctly as Jaahvaah, where the "a"'s sound just like when the doctor has a popsicle stick on your tongue. However, I'm going to say it the Canadian-English way, like "have a nice day"... Java nice day!

Check it out at SUN's Java website.

A fantastic free on-line book about Java is here (by Bruce Eckel).

Plain-'ol C

'C' is nice because it compiles so cleanly and lets you do things like manipulate pointers. For embedded applications, the arguments for going to assembly is gone. Memory and speed are cheap now even in embedded systems, so getting every last clock out of all of your code is not a big issue. Moving to C++ or another OOP language is done by some, but the preponderance of high-level coding for embedded systems will IMHO remain to be 'C'. It's just easier to debug and maintain on your target because you know exactly what your code compiled to, as opposed to an OOP environment where object management and garbage collection is a mystery.

PERL

Perl stands for "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". While contemplating the translation of several thousand lines of code to "C", a co- worker suggested that we try accomplishing the task with Perl. I shunned the idea since I didn't really have time to learn a new language and then spent several man-weeks doing the job manually. Several months later I learned enough Perl in a few hours to accomplish some amazing text-parsing tasks. It's just waaaaaaaaay too easy to use and well designed. 'nuff said.

Check it out at PERL-dot-ORG.

PostScript

By Adobe is another superb language. It is known as a Page Description Language because it is primarily used in printing. But that's not all it need do. I use Perl to generate PostScript code from some text-based data that I have. For example, a Perl script can be used to parse your 'C' code and generate a flow chart in PostScript. Another nice thing about Postsript is that it can be "compiled" to a PDF document.

A great starting point for PostScript Information is here.

One of those can't live without tools is Ghostscript.

Assembly -- What's That?

Yes we still use a little assembly here and there. I recently wrote a Win95 VXD in C and assembly... had to use assembly for some of the I/O code. Also have some pretty tight and critical sections of several embedded systems written in assembly for various target processors. Since machine language is what all high-level languages, inluding OOP languages, eventually execute as, there can be no substitute for knowning rather intimately what makes your processor tick. If you don't do drivers or embedded software, you can pretty safely ignore assembly and be perfectly happy. But assembly will never be completely gone.