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Closed 9 years ago.
I want to know the answer to this question from a technical point of view,
Is COBOL still worth leaning?
What I mean is this: there are some languages you can learn to become a better programmer, for example leaning the assembler can help to understand how a computer work, or learning a functional language when you know an OOP language can teach you to look at programming from another point of view, another way of thinking. Does COBOL have such an advantage?
Learning COBOL is just about the money...
COBOL is actively used in big financial or policy cooperations which have their system from the 80ths and wont want to change it.
In order to keep their system running and updated they need cobol programmers. But today a lot of these programmers are retiring and a lot are bought back to their jobs while doubling their salary.
COBOL isn't pretty or much fun but you can earn some money with it.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
The Google tells me there are several parsec-like libraries for OCaml: Batteries' ParserCo, Planck, Mparser, PCL, and ocaml-parsec. My problem is knowing which one to choose. Can someone give me some feedback concerning stability, active maintenance, quality of documentation, etc?
I have a vague idea of how ParserCo, Planck and PCL look like, and I would start from Planck, expecting to find some rough edges and evolve the library a bit myself over use. None of them are really actively documented, but Planck got some "serious" test cases (parsing the OCaml grammar itself) and the developer, Jun Furuse, is reactive may be interested in getting it upto shape.
That said, parsing combinator libraries are not that popular in the OCaml world. We still quite actively use parser generators. If you don't have strong opinions either way, I recommend that you have a try at Menhir, that is quite polished and nice to use (and also actively maintained).
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Closed 10 years ago.
I started learning ruby on rails few weeks ago. I don't completely understand metaprogramming yet, but first I want to ask whether metaprogramming is worth learning if I only want to use ruby on rails to build websites. The example I see for metaprogramming is for generating undefined class method on the fly, but is it necessary?
My background: I use python on a daily base for scientific computing and have limited experience with django.
Metaprogramming is by no means a requirement to writing websites.
If you're beginning to program in Ruby, it's probably best not to worry about it until you're much more familiar with the language. The added flexibility it affords you comes at the expense of complexity and obscurity.
It depends entirely on the functionality of the website. Learn the basic idea of meta programming , then carry on with what you're doing. You'll then know if you are trying to solve something that meta programming would help with, and you can dig in more.
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Closed 10 years ago.
OK. this might be a very basic question to please don't flame me but I have been googling I want to learn how to write solutions to transportation problems like Wolf, Cabbage, and Goat or traveling salesman using F#
so far my research has taken me to these resources on the web
http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/orclass/integer/integer.html
http://www.zib.de/Publications/Reports/SC-95-27.pdf
Fox-Goat-Cabbage Transportation
http://www.qauprogrammers.com/Article/File-192324030/PROLOG-Programming-with-NET
but despite reading thru these, I have not been able to "think" on how should such a problem be solved in F# type of language
I'd recommend going thru the excellent article Escape from Zurg: An Exercise in Logic Programming. Although the functional language of choice there is Haskell, it should give you enough ideas about programming of optimal search problems functionally.
Also Escape from Zurg in Scala has full source code easily portable to F#.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I've been learning Erlang recently. Erlang is really powerful for implementing distributed applications.
I think the core advantages of Erlang are:
Concurrency-oriented, no locks needed
"Let it crash" design philosophy, avoids to do much defensive coding
Hot code swapping, application distribution becomes easy
Though there are some projects using Erlang, such as CouchDB, RabbitMQ, etc, but the influence of Erlang is still insignificant, compared with Java/Python. Most people will consider Hadoop/MapReduce when designing distributed application, not Erlang. What's the problem with Erlang?
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Closed 11 years ago.
Are there any websites/blogs (perhaps by F# team members?) where thoughts about the future of F# are regularly discussed/revealed?
I know of some team members' blogs, but none that I've found contain this type of content.
http://www.microsoftpdc.com/
which is broadcast online next week, has as session entitled
The Future of F#: Data and Services at your Finger Tips
Don Syme
listed.
(We are always thinking about new ideas, but now that we are part of a shipping product (VS2010) with a typical release cadence (every couple years or so), it is likely that we will be a little less transparent in the months just after shipping a major release, as we start to "bake" some new ideas while encouraging people to use the shipped product... as time passes and it becomes time to ship some CTPs/Betas and whatnot, I expect you'll hear more about the future. Don's talk (and PDC in general) is somewhat forward-looking, I think.)