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I am biologist by profession andI know a little about programming. Irecently came across genetic programming and I want to know more about it. Also what are the pre-requisites for a layman like me to understand this.Any lucid review for beginners on this pl.hyperlink me.

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ok links:

python - http://www.python.org

lisp tutorial- http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/lisp.html

 

reasons:

 

Basically python was created to teach people how to propperly program and indent the code, its a great beginner language, and is powerfull enough to write linux package management systems like portage.

Lisp is the crazy language where programs create programs, create programs, and so forth. Lisp is the language primarily used in Emacs .... oops, Artifficial Intelligence and Genetic Programming, so it will be a perfect hit, its not a really great language to stat with, and thats why python is first, but you dont need the complexity of C++ and other low-level languages...

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I'll have to admit I've become quite fond of Python, and I'd recommend it for the same reason alexander does. Its going to be interesting to see whether it beats Java or goes the way of Logo...but that's for the 2423 thread....

 

BTW: I'll also strongly second alexander's recommendation of Lisp, which is one of my all-time favorite languages, although you should be aware that it goes back to the sixties, and is quite a bizarre language and very obtuse in its syntax ((caaddar ....))))

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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I'll have to admit I've become quite fond of Python, and I'd recommend it for the same reason alexander does. Its going to be interesting to see whether it beats Java or goes the way of Logo...but that's for the "Basic.." thread....

 

BTW: I'll also strongly second alexander's recommendation of Lisp, which is one of my all-time favorite languages, although you should be aware that it goes back to the sixties, and is quite a bizarre language and very obtuse in its syntax ((caaddar ....))))

i love it when we agree on something :hihi:

Yeah, I'd like to see whether it is going to become as popular as Java. oh, btw, there was anexperiment done to see how much space a program consumes at runtime, they were doing C, C++, C# and Java, and the source was very much similar for all of the contestants.

 

I think that the reslts were something like:

C - 6k

C++ - 7-8k

C# - 11k

Java - 170M (with the JRE loading and everything)

it was quite amazing though, pretty hilarious too :xx:

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Oh that's a silly test: C/C++/C# are all the same compiler with slightly different overheads due to class features needing to be layered in, and they're not counting the runtime libraries and OS calls that the JRE replaces... even discounting it, its still just a test of the compiler writer's optimization skills...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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Java has gotten a lot better in J2SE 1.5 but it's still not as good as C# IMHO...
....uh oh, here comes alexander! <Buffy ducks/>

 

C# got lots of good things in it borrowed back from C++. Interesting articles in the trade rags over the last couple of months about how the *internal* Microsoft development teams are *very* happy about C++ getting better support (on equal standing with C#) in VS in the next release...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

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Noooo, no java, java is an obfuscating semi interpreted language that teaches and promotes bad coding practices, fails to pass some ansii standards and is a black box that you put code into and have stuff come out of the back, plus you will not see java for AI and generic programming because resources and speed matter, and if you need to load the platform every time to run java programs, platform that takes up 120-130 megs, its worth writing that code in C++, compiling and executing, since more than 90% of java is C++...

 

It is not a good language for starters, actually I'd argue that its not that great of a language period:

 

Java is a miserable high-level language compared to languages like

Python and Ruby because Java isn't much more expressive than C++;

it is in many ways similar to ObjectC. People that had to port a few

Java apps to Python say that the difference in line count seems to run

around 4:1 for

Java : Python. Java isn't any easier to read, write, or debug.

 

Java is a miserable low-level language compared to languages like

C. Good C generally runs about 10x faster than Java (and

perhaps more strangely, about 2x faster than C++), and with several

times less memory usage. Java is pretty useless for low-level system

programming too, and can't really interact with other parts of the

system (by design). There's no pointers or operator overloading in

Java.

 

Java is also very badly documented. The jdk 1.1 java disassembler

requires the name of the class file but without the file extenstion,

yet this is nowhere to be found in the documentation that comes with

it.

 

To make an analogy, you need a sports car for some purposes and a heavy

duty truck for other purposes, but rather than getting two vehicles you

buy an El Camino and use that for everything. The El Camino is Java.

The people that drive real trucks will laugh at you, the people who

drive real sports cars will laugh at you, and the people who own and

drive both proficiently, well, those are the super-hackers (and

international play-geeks). But if you are just an average wage slave,

you'll probably find plenty of utility in an El Camino. While not

particularly exciting or optimal, it will get the job done in some

fashion and there will be millions of people who made the same decision

because one can argue that it is vaguely general with a minimum of

investment.

 

Java is in many ways like COBOL; very low performing language for

business applications. For that matter you might as well use C#, at

least it has a half-decent syntax...

 

Oh and lastly, there is no support for regular expressions in Java natively!

 

it's a lot wider and deals with networking and databases

First of all that is not the direction that the original question was asking, the original question was asked from the genetic programming, not network-based applications. Second of all if you say that Java deals with wider range of networking applications than Python, you obviously dont know Python, do you? Anything you do in java concerinig both of these applications is very much doable in Python...

 

its also so secure in my opinion

just wondering by what you meant when you said "so secure"?

 

and it's not difficult to learn

for who? a person wh knows very little about programming, yeah I'm sure that having to create a class to do any simple task is very easy for beginner programmers to grasp... Besides the fact that you have to use OO everywhere you go in Java, the synthax is very, very similar to that of C++, and that is pretty cryptic and discombobulating.

Python on the other hand was created to teach people how to program right, how to propperly tab in your code; it teaches and promotes good programming practices!

 

P.S. sorry to snap like that, its just that Java has its applications, but not in teaching people how to program nor genetic programming...

P.P.S. welcome to the forums :friday:

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alexander I think that you would like to hear about the last side project that I worked on. It was to "modernize" a mainframe/DB2 system. The existing code was PL/I and what did they want me to modernize it to? .NET? VB? Java? C++? nope, ANSI C only, running on AIX against an Oracle database. Well it did use the Pro*C precompiler though.

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