maybe that’s where we differ; I don’t consider learning different languages
“suffering”. As Hal pointed out, learning C now might be an investment in
the past, and yet, people still do, and want to, learn lisp! Why?
Certainly not for its commercial value. No, it’s because learning it can
teach you things about your current language; new paradigms, etc.
Also, depending on the environment in which you work, knowing at least C could
be very handy. Not so much on Windows, but on *nix, for example, knowing
enough C to be able to sort out any trivial problems in open source software
you download, rather than having to wait for a new release, or having to bug
someone else to fix it, can save you time and annoyance.
Can C do that? Dunno, I learned it almost 20 years ago and C++ just over
10 and use neither today. Would I take it up today? Probably; I learned a
lot about compilers doing so, how to debug, how the computer “thinks” about
things, etc.
Pretty much the same here. I was just commenting the other day that in the
last couple of months, I’ve written a lot of Ruby, but I’ve also written C
code … because, while REXML is fantastic, it doesn’t like 300MB XML files
very much 
… C++, because I wanted OO but the entire problem required
pure speed (again related to huge XML files), Java and Javascript (not in a
browser, but for general scripting).
All of this, apart from perhaps the Javascript, is all pretty similar stuff,
but each was chosen for a pragmatic reason. As the PPs say, it really is
helpful to have more than one language in your toolkit.
C and/or C++ are worthwhile because they’re the lingua franca of open source
and can be used to get some serious speed improvements in CPU intensive bits
of Ruby programs.
Harry O.
···
On Mon, 28 Apr 2003 22:29, Mike Campbell wrote: