I only have two problems with C#:
1. It is one platform only (for all practical purposes; mono is not even close to being useful) and
2. It is not a standard language. Yes MS BS-ed their way through some committees but only when it is a true standard and equally supported on all major platforms and by more than one vendor, it is still an MS-only playground and as such, it is a completely new language to support only one platform. If as MK says it is not smart to learn a new language for just GUI development, it is even worse to commit yourself to C# for GUI development on only one platform.
IMO it is not silly at all -- perl, python, and ruby are all C interpreters and owe C/C++ much in terms of syntax. I know perl pretty well and do sometimes use it to test ideas for C stuff where the basic libraries are purposefully similar (eg, networking in perl mirrors C). Certainly very often by the time I get around to having to deal with some detail in C it's already familiar because of perl, and C is like an "exploded" view.
People do lots of crazy stuff with python. The only thing I've used it for is GIMP "script-fu", which you can either use scheme/lisp or python. Simple stuff with loops and functions to script the processing of fonts and images. Lisp I found horrifying.
Anyway, go with python. Ruby is very cute, intuitive like PHP. That blender stuff is very nice BTW. Can you draw well?
Last edited by MK27; 06-20-2010 at 10:54 PM.
C programming resources:
GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
The C Book -- nice online learner guide
Current ISO draft standard
CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge
Since Blender so heavily relies on Python I will definitely learn that for sure. Here is a hand study I drew a few weeks ago.
http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e2.../Handstudy.jpg
I plan on using C and Python to help me make some extensions to Blender that I hope will make it a bit more efficient for my purposes.
I looked at scheme/lisp just this afternoon. It does look a bit strange. I have read it's good for AI development and only Fortran is older. Fortran looks pretty straight forward. I did a quick Hello World in it last night and didn't have any trouble figuring out the syntax.
Last edited by jimtuv; 06-20-2010 at 11:16 PM.