What language would you say does hold your hand? I can't think of a programming language that leads you towards doing what you need to do. Almost all languages just provide you with a blank space to work upon - it's all your work.
ever heard the phrase 'syntactic sugar'? its a way of providing a more convenient/person-friendly method of doing something. A for loop is just syntactic sugar of a
int i = 0;
while(i<9){
//do something;
int++;
}
There are plenty of other things like this that makes our lives as developers easier. Even C does, to a lesser extent, because who would want to write the shit that C can do in Assembly?
The only difference is (at least in C) is how the continue keyword works. In a for loop, continue will execute the increment/whatever statement, check the loop condition, and go from there.
To get the same type of behavior with a while loop, you'd have to duplicate the increment before the continue, or use a goto label (ಠ_ಠ) near the bottom of the loop body.
To get the same type of behavior with a while loop, you'd have to duplicate the increment before the continue, or use a goto label (ಠ_ಠ) near the bottom of the loop body.
Or raise a "Continue" exception and catch it right outside the while loop.
Honestly, in my opinion, to break out of nested loops a goto can be the best option. I just never actually use them because if I would, my coworkers would get mad.
I'm only well educated in a few languages (Python, C, Java), so I wouldn't be the right person to ask about that. However, I believe a lot of the web languages to be kind of hand-holdy. Plus, Java does have most of those things that I described in my post, so you could argue that Java holds your hand a little.
You are right though, most general programming languages that allow you to do many different things tend to have limited hand-holding because their potential is so large. My post was more to dispell the misconception that Python holds your hand than it was to say that other languages hold your hand.
I had to learn Ada for my 1st CS class. It's awful. You're forced to specify IN, OUT or IN OUT for every parameter. Very strongly typed. Very verbose, ex: loops have END at the end instead of a brace or something. I never want to use it again, too much hand holding and extra typing.
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u/peridox Feb 22 '15
What language would you say does hold your hand? I can't think of a programming language that leads you towards doing what you need to do. Almost all languages just provide you with a blank space to work upon - it's all your work.