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Google Adds Widgets to Homepage
Panaphonix writes "Google announced that their personalized homepage now has an API for developers to add their own modules. Samples are available in this directory."
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wait until you have better things than a clock and "ColorJunction". Everyone's personalized google homepage will look like a webdesign 101 student who just learned how to cut 'n paste javascript.
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Call me an old-fashioned nit-picker, but I still think that for people who will need to write serious programs, writing 20-line programs in C is the right way to learn basic programming skills. User-interface design etc can wait until people understand how to interate over a table, how to do arithmetic, and most importantly how to convert ideas about solutions to computer code. I've seen CS students who were started on OOP in Java (or C++). Of course the Profs found OOP cool and important, but this meant the students had to deal with software design issues (which is what OOP is all about) before they understood how to write a function that accomplished something. Once you've learned how to program (in C, Fortran, or LOGO for that matter), you can start thinking about user-interface issues, program design issues, efficiency of algorithms, etc. But the bottom-up approach to learning how to programming works better than the top-down style.
\end{rant}Most people who think that C is low level, grungy programming language haven't written a lick of C code and couldn't write anything significant in C if their life depended on it.
C has very simple syntax. The language doesn't get in your way, and once you want to start doing OO, you can pick up C++ fairly easily once you know C.
One of the problems of learning a language like python first, is that it doens't teach you anything about proper dynamic memory allocation, the use of pointers, the use of operating system APIs, etc.
Scripting languages like Python are nice, but you'll never learn anything about systems-level programming writing things in Python, so, for example, your hands will be tied when new hardware comes along until us C programmers come along and write a library for you to access its driver.
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