New to Programming

A

arnuld

Keith said:
I was thinking I'd take the MiG, sell it, use some of the money to buy
a VW Bug, and drive to the bank with a trunk full of cash.

Ha...Ha....Ha..... great way, great thinking.... :)
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith)

thanks for telling that.
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.

what does that mean?
 
A

arnuld

Joe said:
Dummy, the trunk of the VW has an engine in it. There is not nearly
enough room under the hood to hold that much cash.

Take the MiG, sell it on eBay, money to PayPal, take a cab across town.

Joe is intelligent ....Goody..good :)

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
--- Albert Einstein ---

i, really, never understood what exactly that means?

may you explain?
 
R

Richard Heathfield

arnuld said:
what does that mean?

It's a quotation from "Yes Minister" (certainly the book and quite possibly
the TV series as well), the purpose of which is to expose the kind of
flawed logic which many people employ, often without realising it.

In the original, the target was politicians; Keith is probably aiming at
programmers instead, and that's fair enough, but it is nevertheless a great
shame that he doesn't ascribe the quotation properly (to Antony Jay and
Jonathan Lynn).
 
C

CBFalconer

Flash said:
.... snip ...


It's the old politicians fallacy as given in Yes Minister (it may
pre-date that for all I know). See http://www.yes-minister.com/
for more on Yes Minister.

PBS (US) used to show that regularly, later yes-prime-minister.
One of the funniest series I have seen. Unfortunately they stopped
it.
 
M

Malcolm

SG said:
I am a complete novice at computers and programming and right now, all
i need to know is that why do many people prefer C to C++? Is it just
because they are used to using C and are conservative about switching
over to C++ or is there some other reason?
C is a successful language, primarily because pointers abstract the basic
machine operations very powerfully and efficiently.
C++ is an attempt to improve it. As with most suggested improvements, you
get some people who are very enthusiastic, and some people who hate the
idea.
C++ allows object-oriented programming, which is very unwieldy in C, however
it brings its own problems. The object-orientation itself is controversial.
It is not the panacea that some proponents would have you believe.
Secondly, could you please tell me how the knowledge of C will help me
later on? I have a teacher here who just shrugged at this question and
replied that the knowledge of C will help me learn the other advanced
languages later on... Is this true?
Yes it will. C is very close to the machine. With a solid foundation in C,
you should be able to pick up virtually any language relatively quickly.
This is particularly true of C++, because it is a near superset of C.
In the same way, it is useful to learn how to do multiplications and long
divisions by hand. In professional life I hardly ever do these operations by
hand, of course, because the calculator is just a click away. However having
this knowledge means that I know what the calcuator is doing, so I can use
it effectively.
 
A

arnuld

SG said:
Secondly, could you please tell me how the knowledge of C will help me
later on? I have a teacher here who just shrugged at this question and
replied that the knowledge of C will help me learn the other advanced
languages later on... Is this true?

really, i do not have any answer to this question but i can not resist
some thoughts. i have some feelings for C i am not able to understand.
earlier this month i started my BLOG & i worte an article "On The
Perils of Java Schools" as my viewpoint on Joel Spolsky's article "The
Perils of Java Schools". these are some of the lines from my blog:

".....what i do think is, having the skills of a *musician* is a
sufficient and not the necessary condition. i feel, becausee of my
experience, that the part of brain that *creates* great-music also
creates great-softwares. If you have an *analytical-ear* for music then
you have it, then you can become an extremely brilliant programmer, the
ones who are rare & i....."

now i will explain the situation:

--- i like "hard-rcok", Metallica, Iron-Maiden, Black Sabbath,
Marilyn Manson, Pink Floyd are among my faourites. "Rock" is quite
deep, has more meaning than pop, IMHO. everytime i listen to my
faourite songs, i feel i am holding "K&R2" in my hands or i feel i am
"UNIX or C", NO i never saw how K&R2 looks like, i ordered this book 5
hours ago. i feel i am "history of UNIX, i am PDP-11". now i listen to
many other songs but that happens only with Rock music & at the same
time i get the "technical-ability" to dissect the songs, i feel like as
if my brain is taking vocals, guitars & drums apart as 3 different
things & then making a genius-piece of each of these parts then it
assembles them together to create the original master-piece & sometimes
i also create my own. at that time, i dwell deep untill there is C,
UNIX, rock & me, they & me become the one. ---

Can anybody explain why i feel so? i ask because folks here carry
much-wider experience of C, UNIX & LIFE in general. may be i am able to
understand something about myself through comp.lang.c

(that never happened with C++, Ruby or Python. Lisp is also a different
story but it is nearly like the one i told you except that i started to
feel that way after 6 months from when i 1st learnt it. 6 months ago it
was just like other langugaes.)

thanks for your precious time.

--arnuld
http://arnuld.blogspot.com
 
K

Keith Thompson

Richard Heathfield said:
arnuld said:

It's a quotation from "Yes Minister" (certainly the book and quite possibly
the TV series as well), the purpose of which is to expose the kind of
flawed logic which many people employ, often without realising it.

In the original, the target was politicians; Keith is probably aiming at
programmers instead, and that's fair enough, but it is nevertheless a great
shame that he doesn't ascribe the quotation properly (to Antony Jay and
Jonathan Lynn).

<OT>
No, I'm not aiming it at programmers. More detail than that would be
seriously off-topic, but I'm satisfied with the ambiguity; it's
applicable to nearly anything. It's almost a universal fallacy.

When I started using it as my sig quote, I didn't know where it came
from, and I don't know where I got it. I'm not sure that I've ever
seen an episode of "Yes Minister", and I've never read the book.

The earliest Usenet reference to the line is from 1992, and it
explicitly refers to "Yes Minister". (Adding "-supercomputer" to the
search terms helped a great deal.)

I'll certainly consider adding an attribution.

IMDB shows Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn as the creators of the series,
and the writers of at least some episodes. Are you sure they wrote
that specific line? Perhaps I'll just attribute it to the series.
</OT>
 
R

Richard Heathfield

Keith Thompson said:

IMDB shows Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn as the creators of the series,
and the writers of at least some episodes. Are you sure they wrote
that specific line?

Yes, they wrote all the episodes, and all the books (which are all taken
from the TV series, but re-cast in the form of diaries).
 
G

Gordon Burditt

We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
Recent US administrations (of both parties) probably consider this
to be a state secret. It's how they come up with ideas like
protecting a 2100-mile border with a 700-mile fence, and the CAN-SPAM
act which does nothing much about SPAM. Next they're probably going
to require registration of hotel bar keys and paper clips because
they can be used to breach the security of a Diebold electronic
voting machine.
PBS (US) used to show that regularly, later yes-prime-minister.
One of the funniest series I have seen. Unfortunately they stopped
it.

It's difficult to keep getting funding from a government when you're
leaking its best secrets, even if you don't realize it and the
government won't admit it.
 

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