8). Programming in C can cause dain bramage.

Looks like I've got Dyslexia @_@.

Ah, C, the language I love to hate, as I write more code in it than any other language. (Granted, mostly in support for languages that aren't C) At this point I'm ambivalent. On the one hand I think more programmers should know it because it gives a lot of low-level power that you don't have in most other languages that're in vogue today. (Forth's good for that too) On the other, an awful lot of the programmers I know who program in it ought not to, since they'd do a lot less damage in most other languages.

It's a pity the Lisp guys, lo those many years ago, dove straight down to the depths of elegant, unreadable consistency. Had the syntax and presentation not sucked so very hard the computing world would likely have been a much, much better place. Continuations, tail calls, first class functions, closures, working garbage collection... the list of stuff that slowly comes to the surface thirty years after it was first done in Lisp is kind of depressing, really. Pretty much all of it basically insanely difficult to do in C, and damn tough to implement in C for other languages.

'Course, it may well have been that the general state of the art wasn't up for run of the mill programmers to handle stuff like that, so it wouldn't have mattered. Still, I can but hope for the death of C. (But just for other people, you understand )

When I learned C I was already quite fluent in Pascal. Going to C from Pascal, I felt like I had been let out of a cage. Being let out of a cage is not a completely positive experience, because you now have to fend for yourself.

I've dabbled with C++ and Java, but never did much with them. I've avoided C#, mostly because that scale just never seemed sufficienty under the fingers, and I preferred to think of it as Db. Most of what I was doing made much more sense in a procedural language rather than object-oriented.

You said that C is ugly, but ((((((((((((((((((lisp))))))))))))))))))) has it beat.

I was never destined to be a great programmer because I liked doing things just because they were cool. I liked things like recursion and operator overloading.

These days, about all I write is HTML, PHP, and MySQL. I can handle any of those, but in real life I have to use them all together, and that's where I get confused. Each has its own syntax, such as when you need quotation marks and whether you need single or double, and such. I need to imbed MySQL commands inside PHP commands which themselves might be inside a line of HTML, so I get lost as to whose syntax I'm supposed to be using at the moment and what characters have to be escaped. Nice ugly old C sounds pretty good by comparison.