What prompted the creation of Falcon? Part of my daily job was taking care of the status of servers streaming real time data through financial networks. A scripting facility in the control application would have been a godsend, as the alert conditions were too complex to be determined, constantly shifting and requiring constant supervision. I was not new to the topic, as I previously worked on the XHarbour project (a modern porting of the xbase languages), and I also did some research in the field.

R (http://www.r-project.org) is an integrated suite of software tools for data manipulation, calculation, and graphical display. It provides a huge set of statistical and graphical techniques such as linear and nonlinear modelling, statistical tests, time series analysis, non-parametric statistics, generalized linear models, classification, clustering, bootstrap, and many others. R is being developed for the Unix, Windows, and MacOS operating systems.

The core of R is an interpreted computer language that allows branching and looping as well as modular programming using functions

You may notice that I didn't list Java or PHP. Why not? Because they're primarily used to write software that runs Web servers. Java (which despite the name has nothing to do with JavaScript) is sometimes used to write desktop applications or cellphone games, but it's relatively complex and I don't recommend it as a first langauge. PHP is a little simpler, but it isn't used much outside Web servers and for most beginning programmers, you're better off with another language.

We examine four sources of information. First, the raw number of results found with Google's search engine. We also look at dollars per click information gleaned from an online advertising service (Overture). In other words, how much it costs you, the advertiser, per click for ads placed with search terms such as “java consulting” or “perl training”. In addition, to look at the open source community's take on the situation, we look at projects registered with freshmeat. We also use the Craig's List (http://www.craigslist.org) job search board as a source for very rough job statistics.

Why create a new programming language? Because C++ is complicated and expensive to implement. Most C++ programmers get accustomed to using certain feature sets and never touch any others, because it is too hard to remember them all. This is not a problem for the compiler, but for other programmers trying to read the code it can be, because they might be used to other feature sets. D avoids this problem, because it was hugely simplified without removing important features. But that is not the only benefit D has.

The original goal for Tcl was to make it easy to build applications with powerful command languages. At the time I didn't envision Tcl being used as a stand-alone programming language, though that is probably the way that most people have used it.

"Don't get fixated on one or two languages. When I started in 1969, FORTRAN, COBOL and S/360 Assembler were the big tickets. Today, Java, C and Visual Basic are. In 10 years time, some new set of languages will be the 'in thing.' …At last count, I knew/have learned over 24 different languages in over 30 years," Wayne Duqaine, director of Software Development at Grandview Systems, of Sebastopol, Calif., told eWEEK.

...Let me begin by listing the five contenders: C, C++, Java, Python and Perl. There are, of course, lots of other programming languages; however, references to these five appear more than most, especially in the Linux world.

Before looking at each language in turn, there is one thing we can say about them all: they are general-purpose and can be used for most any programming task. A general distinction is that C and C++ are compiled languages, much like Fortran, whereas Python and Perl are interpretive, like most versions of BASIC. Java is somewhere in the middle; source code is compiled into an intermediate format which is then interpreted...

Readers who know how to use some other scripting language, such as Perl, will benefit most from this series. Joshua begins his exploration into Ruby with a discussion of variables, quotes, arrays, objects, and methods. Subsequent articles in this Ruby series will deal with more advanced topics, including developing graphical applications and using Ruby with databases.

"Every few years something significant happens in the land of computer programming. In my opinion the Ruby computer language is such a landmark."

"Over the years I have seen programmer productivity go up. These are no hard measured calculations, but I have the impression that every five years the speed of delivering software doubles. Not only that, the curve for writing maintainable software appears to increase linearly too. A lot of that speed can be attributed to the tools of a developer, and core to these tools is the computer language."

PHP, for example, wasn't a novelty when it was created. As a language, it's nothing particularly innovative compared with others of its kind. However, it did dynamic web pages really well, and very easily compared to other systems available at the time. I recall setting up mod_perl and installing various components that often had version requirements. It was a pain compared to the more tightly integrated PHP setup. Another example, as mentioned above, was the combination of Tk with Tcl for scripting GUIs. Tcl is well suited to a variety of tasks, from running on Cisco routers to doing web scripting itself, but Tk was its home run, and what it became known for.

D is a (relatively) new addition to the C family of programming languages, intended as a successor to C++ but also incorporating ideas and improvements from other C-like languages such as Java and C#. It is an object-oriented, garbage-collected, systems programming language that is compiled to executable rather than bytecode. The specification and reference compiler are currently at version 0.82, and are expected to reach 1.0 within the year. The reference compiler runs on both Windows and Linux x86, and the frontend if Open-Sourced. A port of the frontend to GCC is underway and already functional on Linux x86 and Mac OS X.

This document is intended to be a tutorial, showing how to write a simple assembly program in several UNIX operating systems on IA32 (i386) platform. Included material may or may not be applicable to other hardware and/or software platforms. Document explains program layout, system call convention, and build process. It accompanies Linux Assembly HOWTO, which may be of your interest as well, though is more Linux specific...

The answer is that although C++ is better than C, it's not that much better. In other words, the cost of converting C programs to C++ out weighs the benefit of conversion. Another problem is that there are not enough C++ programmers out there. So many companies faced with a huge amount of C code and a large number of C programmers, tend to stay with C. That's not to say that C++ won't grow in popularity in the future, but for now there's still a lot of C out there.