OT: Nomad programmer needs tools

"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message 
news:1152185703.381435.283130@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
> Hi all.
>
> The last few weeks have revealed that I need to learn a 
> programming
> language that fits a nomad lifestyle. By "nomad" I mean
>
> - The code needs to be portable to most/all relevant OS/HW 
> platforms
>  (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Java is probably the most portable "serious" programming 
language that meets all your other requirements, but Java 
is, so far as I can determine, highly under-represented in 
the embedded world, where a lot of DSP is done.  Another 
consideration is that if you are trying to squeeze the last 
drop of performance out of some critical code, your direct 
access to native machine language (JNI) is "circuitous" at 
best and mostly painful.

> - Compiling the programs ought to be possible without 
> major amounts
>  of $$$ spent on compilers

If you want to do Java, get the Netbeans 5.0 IDE.  It comes 
bundled with the latest JDK from Sun, it's a serious 
development environment, it runs equally well on Linux and 
Windows, and it's free.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download-netbeans.html

> - The programming language needs to be able to handle 
> complex data
>  structures and objects
> - The programming language should be clearly defined as a 
> *language*,
>  not a shell script, that could be confused for an OS 
> add-on by
>  owners of computer systems
> - The programming language ought to be able to handle COM 
> objects
>  to manipulate excel files and word documents

You might consider the latest versions (Version 2.3+, or 
2.4+) of Python.  The IDE is still clunky, but the language 
is highly under-rated (it *rocks*).  It can be installed on 
a Microsoft web server as a COM object and used to write 
highly sophisticated server-side web pages.

> - The programming language needs to be easy to learn for 
> me, who is
>  familiar with C++
>
> The one language that springs to mind is Java. Are there 
> others?

I taught myself C# in about two weeks to a level of 
proficiency where I could use it to write services for 
Windows 2003 server.  But, C# is a Microsoft-only 
proposition, so far as I know, it isn't cheap, it isn't 
fast, and I already had a lot of experience developing Java 
and C++ under various IDE's.


> Does anybody have suggestions for first-read books or 
> other literature
> for C++ programmers to learn Java?

Start with http://java.sun.com/  There's a lot of material 
available online. For example 
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html

The books that I consult most are:

(1) Geary, David M.,
Graphic Java Mastering the AWT 2nd Ed.
ISBN 0-13-863077-1

(2) Niemeyer, Patrick and Peck, Joshua,
Exploring Java 2nd Ed.
ISBN 1-56592-271-9

(3) Gosling, James, Arnold, Ken, and Holmes, David,
The Java Programming Language Third Edition
ISBN 0-201-70433-1 (A Fourth Edition is available)

>
> Rune
> 

John E. Hadstate wrote:
> "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message
> news:1152185703.381435.283130@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
> > Hi all.
> >
> > The last few weeks have revealed that I need to learn a
> > programming
> > language that fits a nomad lifestyle. By "nomad" I mean
> >
> > - The code needs to be portable to most/all relevant OS/HW
> > platforms
> >  (Windows, Mac, Linux)
>
> Java is probably the most portable "serious" programming
> language that meets all your other requirements, but Java
> is, so far as I can determine, highly under-represented in
> the embedded world, where a lot of DSP is done.  Another
> consideration is that if you are trying to squeeze the last
> drop of performance out of some critical code, your direct
> access to native machine language (JNI) is "circuitous" at
> best and mostly painful.

Run-time performance is not a consideration here. It's a matter
of getting any performance at all, the alternative is to do things
manually.

> > - Compiling the programs ought to be possible without
> > major amounts
> >  of $$$ spent on compilers
>
> If you want to do Java, get the Netbeans 5.0 IDE.  It comes
> bundled with the latest JDK from Sun, it's a serious
> development environment, it runs equally well on Linux and
> Windows, and it's free.

Brilliant. It's a bit too big to download right now (~150 MB), but
I'll definately have a look at this.

> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download-netbeans.html
>
> > - The programming language needs to be able to handle
> > complex data
> >  structures and objects
> > - The programming language should be clearly defined as a
> > *language*,
> >  not a shell script, that could be confused for an OS
> > add-on by
> >  owners of computer systems
> > - The programming language ought to be able to handle COM
> > objects
> >  to manipulate excel files and word documents
>
> You might consider the latest versions (Version 2.3+, or
> 2.4+) of Python.  The IDE is still clunky, but the language
> is highly under-rated (it *rocks*).  It can be installed on
> a Microsoft web server as a COM object and used to write
> highly sophisticated server-side web pages.

Web servers is not something I am very concerned about
right now.

> > - The programming language needs to be easy to learn for
> > me, who is
> >  familiar with C++
> >
> > The one language that springs to mind is Java. Are there
> > others?
>
> I taught myself C# in about two weeks to a level of
> proficiency where I could use it to write services for
> Windows 2003 server.  But, C# is a Microsoft-only
> proposition, so far as I know, it isn't cheap, it isn't
> fast, and I already had a lot of experience developing Java
> and C++ under various IDE's.

Three good reasons to stay away from C#, then...

> > Does anybody have suggestions for first-read books or
> > other literature
> > for C++ programmers to learn Java?
>
> Start with http://java.sun.com/  There's a lot of material
> available online. For example
> http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html
>
> The books that I consult most are:
>
> (1) Geary, David M.,
> Graphic Java Mastering the AWT 2nd Ed.
> ISBN 0-13-863077-1
>
> (2) Niemeyer, Patrick and Peck, Joshua,
> Exploring Java 2nd Ed.
> ISBN 1-56592-271-9
>
> (3) Gosling, James, Arnold, Ken, and Holmes, David,
> The Java Programming Language Third Edition
> ISBN 0-201-70433-1 (A Fourth Edition is available)

Thanks. I'll have a look at these. 

Rune

Andrew Reilly wrote:
> Hi Rune,
>
> On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 10:09:52 -0700, Rune Allnor wrote:
> > Jack Klein wrote:
> >> On 6 Jul 2006 04:35:04 -0700, "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no>
> >> wrote in comp.dsp:
> >>
> >> > Hi all.
> >> >
> >> > The last few weeks have revealed that I need to learn a programming
> >> > language that fits a nomad lifestyle. By "nomad" I mean
> >> >
> >> > - The code needs to be portable to most/all relevant OS/HW platforms
> >> >   (Windows, Mac, Linux)
> >> > - Compiling the programs ought to be possible without major amounts
> >> >   of $$$ spent on compilers
> >> > - The programming language needs to be able to handle complex data
> >> >   structures and objects
> >> > - The programming language should be clearly defined as a *language*,
> >> >   not a shell script, that could be confused for an OS add-on by
> >> >   owners of computer systems
> >> > - The programming language ought to be able to handle COM objects
> >> >   to manipulate excel files and word documents
> >>
> >> What Excel files and Word documents on Linux, Solaris, UNIX?  For that
> >> matter, what COM objects on these platforms?
> >
> > Ah, sorry.
> >
> > Right now I need to work with Excel and MSWord on the PC. But I want to
> >
> > use a portable language. I'm too old and jaded to learn more
> > programming
> > languages than absolutely necessary.
>
> Now I see your original post, I can perhaps equivocate a little about my
> previous statement:
>
> The first and last conditions might come close to being incompatible, COM
> being a strictly Microsoft thing.  Most people using a lot of COM seem to
> prefer Visual C++ or Visual Basic, neither of which fit the portability
> constraint.  A spot of googling has found this project page:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacob-project/ which claims to be a
> java-com bridge, which naturally only runs on Windows platforms, as it
> uses JNI to do the COM access stuff.

Thanks.

> The other place to look might be the OpenOffice.org development web site
> and source code: OOo is both cross-platform and knows how to play with COM
> data in Excel and Word documents, and I believe that the COM import/export
> facilities are written in Java (although I could easily be wrong about
> that: I haven't looked.)  I don't know how reasonable it would be to
> extract the necessary classes to use in your own projects; there could be
> too many dependancies on the rest of the OOo infrastructure to make that
> worthwhile.

I use C++/Qt or matlab for my own stuff. This thread was started
because
I see a need to bring tools I am familiar with, that are portable
between
platforms as well as can handle COM objects when needed, when I work
on other people's systems. It's not an option to install my own matlab
lisence and C++ compilers, and I don't want to intrude on/mess up the
host system more than absolutely necessary. I believe it is easier to
get
permission to install the Java development kit on a host system, than
mess around with OpenOffice, cygwin and what not.

> Regarding Java books: I picked up "Just Java2, 6th ed" by Peter van der
> Linden because it appeared to cover the useful stuff and because it was
> there on the local bookshop shelf.  It's a reasonable book, but I found
> that I didn't actually use it much.  Instead I wrapped my brain
> around the standard library class set by just starting coding, with the
> class documentation open in a browser on my desktop.  The language itself
> is so simple that it doesn't needs much study to figure it out.  The
> standard class library is big, though.  There are a lot of good tutorials
> on the web too, although some are getting a bit out of date now, with
> respect to the current versions of the language and GUI libraries.

Again, I'm of that generation (I was born before man first set foot on
the
moon...) who tend to prefer books. Online stuff is OK when you want to
find out the order or format of the arguments to some function. For
reading,
I prefer text on paper.

> Other relatively popular, free, cross-platform GUI programming
> environments include C++ (gcc) with wxWindows, Python + wxWindows and
> Python + tk.  (For DSP work, you probably also want the Python Numeric
> package, or numpy, or SciPy or whatever it is now, or something like
> Atlas+FFTW under C++.)  The main trouble with all of these, IMO, is that
> it takes quite a bit of effort to put all of the pieces together from
> their different respective sources, and they have incompatible version
> upgrades often enough that maintaining a stable platform over a long
> period of time can be painful. I did a little control GUI in Python +
> wxWindows about a year ago, and while it was fun to write, it was hard to
> deploy on other people's Windows machines (I'd done the development on Mac
> OS X and FreeBSD), and when I came back to it a year later I discovered
> that the then-current versions of Python (and more significantly
> wxWindows) had changed so much that my code didn't work any more.  That
> experience pushed me towards Java...

Ease of use and a minimal system mess-up-factor is essential here.
I am not at all interested in starting pieceing lots of tiny fragments
together.

> Java isn't perfect either, by any stretch of the imagination, but I think
> that it's the least broken option available at the moment.  With the most
> recent Sun JVMs performance on numerical code is, IMO, reasonable to
> excellent, and my coding productivity is significantly higher than under
> C++, thanks largely to the wealth of abstract data structure libraries and
> the convenience of using them that garbage collection offers.

Thanks.

Rune

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 20:16:09 -0700, Rune Allnor wrote:
> Again, I'm of that generation (I was born before man first set foot on
> the
> moon...) who tend to prefer books. Online stuff is OK when you want to
> find out the order or format of the arguments to some function. For
> reading,
> I prefer text on paper.

I'm not as young as all that: I remember hearing the moon landing on the
radio, myself.

In this particular case, though, the issue is/was just that the on-line
class API documentation is well structured and heavily hyperlinked, and I
found that invaluable.  Because of the hierarchial nature of class
inheritance, you don't really want to be repeating documentation for base
class methods and members in the description of each derived class, but
when you're learning the system, you do need to easily get to those
definitions quickly.  Clicking on a "supplied by base class" link, or
using the multi-frame indexes walks all over any paper reference manual,
IMO.  Unlike a tutorial, there's no linear narative that could
meaningfully be imposed on the reference.

Sure, for tutorials, paper could be the way to go.  I got more out of
"Just Java2", faster, than I did from the collection of tutorials on the
web, and it was all up-to-date.  I found, though, that it didn't take the
book/tutorial long to get me into the "Java mind-set", at which point I
found the API reference more useful.  I think that happened by the time I
was about a third of the way through the book.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew

"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> writes:

> Martin Blume wrote:
> >  (I personally dislike Excel very much) and
> > word documents.
> 
> So do I. But dealing with excel and MSWord is part of the job.
> If I can do what I want in C++/java/something else, and then
> export the end product to excel -- as opposed to work
> solely with excel as I do now -- I'll be a lot happier.
> 

Python has some good PDF libraries, which may obviate the need to do
Word (if all you need to do is create reports).  I;ve used them to
convert Gerber PCB data to PDF for example...

Numerical stuff, I tend to create CSV files with python and then use
Excel for presentation if required.  I do this by linking to the CSV
file, that way I don't have to drive Excel direct from python, but I
can use it to present data in ways people are familiar with.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
martin.j.thompson@trw.com 
TRW Conekt - Consultancy in Engineering, Knowledge and Technology
http://www.trw.com/conekt  
   

"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message 
news:1152240715.726782.175440@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
>
> John E. Hadstate wrote:
>> "Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message
>> news:1152185703.381435.283130@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...

>> > - The programming language ought to be able to handle 
>> > COM
>> > objects
>> >  to manipulate excel files and word documents
>>
>> You might consider the latest versions (Version 2.3+, or
>> 2.4+) of Python.  The IDE is still clunky, but the 
>> language
>> is highly under-rated (it *rocks*).  It can be installed 
>> on
>> a Microsoft web server as a COM object and used to write
>> highly sophisticated server-side web pages.
>
> Web servers is not something I am very concerned about
> right now.
>

What I was trying to point out is that Python 2.3 or later 
does both sides of COM.  That's probably what I should have 
said.

By the way, I've never done COM through Java.  I'm pretty 
sure that Java's equivalent, RMI, is not compatible with 
COM.  Microsoft may support access to COM through J++/J# but 
neither of those enjoys the advantages of Java.

Rune Allnor wrote:
> I use C++/Qt or matlab for my own stuff. This thread was started
> because
> I see a need to bring tools I am familiar with, that are portable
> between
> platforms as well as can handle COM objects when needed, when I work
> on other people's systems. It's not an option to install my own matlab
> lisence and C++ compilers, and I don't want to intrude on/mess up the
> host system more than absolutely necessary. I believe it is easier to
> get
> permission to install the Java development kit on a host system, than
> mess around with OpenOffice, cygwin and what not.
> 

Hey Rune,

Have you considered the possibility of using one of the "Live" Linux 
CD's?  Basically, the PC boots from the CD, runs Linux, and leaves the 
hard drive alone (although it /can/ read and write it if you ask it to).

Knoppix is the most popular of these distributions, and it comes with 
gcc.  I dunno if it comes with Qt or not, but if it doesn't, I'm SURE 
there is a variant out there that does.  Damn Small Linux is another 
possibility, and it lets you install pacakges to a hard drive (or USB 
drive), and then create a new ISO image you can burn to CD including all 
the goodies you've added.

Knoppix coupled with a USB flash drive to store your work will get you a 
portable system that won't disturb anyone's installation (it will 
require a reboot though).

That probably does preclude the use of Matlab, but you can probably find 
(or make) a CD with Scilab.

-- 
Jim Thomas            Principal Applications Engineer  Bittware, Inc
jthomas@bittware.com  http://www.bittware.com    (603) 226-0404 x536
Hope springs occasionally.

"John E. Hadstate" schrieb
> 
> I taught myself C# in about two weeks to a level of 
> proficiency where I could use it to write services for 
> Windows 2003 server.  But, C# is a Microsoft-only 
> proposition, so far as I know, it isn't cheap, it isn't 
> fast, and I already had a lot of experience developing Java 
> and C++ under various IDE's.
> 
> 
AFAIK, C# was invented by Microsoft, but is now entered as a 
international standard (ECMA?) and there exists also a Linux
C# compiler. Together with MONO, a .NET implementation of the
MS .NET framework on Linux, this might achieve some platform
independence (at least between MS Windows and Linux, but
apparently also others). 

For more information, have a look at www.mono-project.com.

But for applications, where most of the work is done parsing
more or less well-defined ASCII text input and then doing only
a little (< 5 min) computation, I prefer Perl, Python or AWK.

Regards
Martin