<p>I have a copy of Foundations of Computer Science, C Edition by Aho and Ullman on my desk. There’s Esakov and Weiss too. Windows is written in C/C++. You think that they don’t have any great algorithms? How about Linux? Firefox?</p>
<p>Do you see them? Can you understand what they do?</p>
<p>I can go to Matlab central and get 100’s or 1000’s of algorithms and understand what they do. There is a difference.</p>
<p>I’ve been a professional software engineer for 25 years. So yes, I know a little about algorithms. Have you worked on software packages with tens of millions of lines of code?</p>
<p>No, up to ~30k was the most Ive done.</p>
<p>What do you think those huge software applications are written in? Matlab? Lisp? COBOL? Don’t you think that there may be a few interesting algorithms in huge software applications?</p>
<p>A good chunk of the computing world still runs on C and C++.</p>
<p>Yeah, I know that a lot of client web processing runs on Javascript. But guess what Javascript interpreters and now Javascript JIT compilers run on.</p>
<p>“good chunk of the computing world still runs on C and C++.”</p>
<p>I’d say that’s an understatement =) </p>
<p>And honestly a person with a great knowledge of C and C++ can learn any other language easily.</p>
<p>i took a year long class of programming in Visual Basic (we had C++ but the teacher didnt want to use it)</p>
<p>it was a couple years ago but will it help me cuase it is similar to C++, or hurt me cuase its different?</p>
<p>Visual Basic is more of a 4GL than a 3GL and it shields a lot of the hardware from you. I haven’t used it since the 1990s but I didn’t find it anything like C++ which is a 3GL. You can do a lot of powerful things with drag and drop which would take more work in C/C++.</p>
<p>VB isn’t portable either.</p>
<p>The basic ideas of doing a loop, logical structures, global versus local variables, and stuff like that are similar in C++ and VB, so your experience in one should help you with the other.</p>
<p>Nowadays I prefer to use C++, but when I just want to do a quick and simple program I’ll usually stick with VB for its ease of use.</p>