Comment by sbalea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbalea | Hacker News Reader

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First of all, for practical reasons, do not learn C++. Sure, dive into C, it'll teach you a great deal about programming close to the metal. But I consider C++ unnecessary these days, outside niches such as game programming. You'll be an order of magnitude more productive if you go with a higher level language and drop down to pure C when you need performance.

That being said, if you insist on C++, Visual Studio on Windows, XCode on Mac and KDevelop on Linux would be my IDEs of choice. On Linux and Mac most people use vim or emacs though. Libraries to look into would be the standard STL and Boost. Qt or wxWidgets for GUIs.

COBOL? I'm sure you can run it on a modern computer, hell, my iphone is an order of magnitude more powerful than the mainframes from 30-40 years ago... but in the name of all that's good and holy, why would you ever want to do that?

> why would you ever want to do that

There are still a lot of banking applications in COBOL and other ooold languages around - I have always been wondering how much of a financially interesting niche this could be... work few hours a week and bill them royally since there are not too many people around who can do it anymore and a lot of them are bound to retire sooner or later.

My understanding is that C++ is a highest-level programming language. What would be a higher-than-C++ level language?

He's probably referring to interpreted languages (Python, Ruby etc.)

why is that considered higher level?

It mostly depends on your definition of 'higher level' (since all of these languages are Turing Complete languages). I've heard interpreted languages referred to as higher level because of things like dynamic typing (also being typesafe) and their variety of built in data structures and methods that create a greater level of abstraction for the programmer. I think the 'higher level' term is used often to refer to observed levels of abstraction even if it's not technically accurate.

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