According to Tim O'Reilly's always interesting quarterly analysis of the book industry, Ruby is doing extraordinarily well, with a 689% quarterly increase in sales and is now approaching Perl in terms of book sales.
Caveats include the (some would say profound) difference between book sales and use. Most Perl programmers …
more ...The C99 language standard added support for variable length arrays (VLAs):
void foo(int len){ float myArray[len]; ... }
In porting some C# code to C++, I had a method signature like that, so I tried to use a VLA. Sadly, VC++ 2005 produces "error C2057: expected constant expression," "error C2466 …
more ...John Montgomery's revelation that the most commonly used languages of non-professional programmers are HTML, JavaScript, and C++ is worth reflecting on.
First, let's just state the obvious: HTML without JavaScript isn't a programming language, and few people are using Rhino or what-have-you to explore JavaScript as a standalone language, so …
more ...Eric Gunnerson, discussing "Why so many languages?" makes the key point that "Compactness and simplicity have big benefits as well in programming languages."
Once upon a time, I made a good living teaching Java. Sometimes I taught it to C and C++ developers, sometimes I taught it to COBOL developers …
more ...The WMPlayer10SDK does not contain the expected primary interop assembly (PIA) so that Windows Media Player can be programmed from .NET languages such as Visual Basic and C#. The WMP 9 SDK puts a PIA in the /redist directory. However, the WMP10 SDK can be programmed in a managed language …
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