It means that if you learn C, than you have a light weight language and you will need to look toward learning system interfaces and windows toolkits that are platform specific. In other words you will generalize towards native software architectures and even hardware architectures. On the other hand, Middleware Java is more or less an all in one package. You just have to learn the vendor classes of which there are several thousand that are organized into a namespace heirarchy. You can create your own libraries, but for the most part you will just be specializing premade classes (extending them). You will be a specialist that finds information needs through vendor libraries and you will not be encouraged to learn system interfaces or native toolkits.

It has to do with the programmers focus. Use middleware if you don't plan on joining an open source team or working as a system developer for a software corporation like Sun or Microsoft. (although there is some open source java work being done through the Apache Jakarta group ... but you are not forced to join teams if the vendor libraries meet your needs).

If you want to join an open source team and build systems, and perform research and development, than learn C or C++.

What? It IS more powerful than Python.

Doesn't that contradict your last statement?

Yeah ... at first. It gets easier though.

yep ....

! What? Like what? Tetris & Dr. Mario maybe, but not anything like Myst or Half-life.

No, you can get more done in C because there are things you just can't do in Python (like access the BIOS, or direct hardware/video access) thus making C a more powerful language.

Powerful is a pretty subjective term, surely? I think you could say that Python is more powerful than C in that it has more economy of expression (Python programs are almost always shorter than an equivelent C program), but C is more powerful than Python in that there are more libraries for it.

What's all this stuff about C giving low-level hardware access, though? You need assembler to do that...I suppose it's easier to use assembler with C than it is with Python.

Alex

a nice feature of python is that you can plug C right into it. if you have sections of code that need more hardware control/speed. http://python.org/doc/current/ext/ext.html

lol. ok. don't get carried away or confused.
it seems that you want to program in C at the end of the day. so why are u talking about / learning python?
if you want to learn C, stick at it. if you wanna learn python, then learn python.
languages are just that: languages. they can be learnt over a period of time. all u really need is the mind to think the way a programmer thinks. the language is only a tool. a means to an end. i seriously doubt that you can be classified as generalist or specialist by the language you specialize in (pardon me, it's just a point of view).
different languages were created to address different problems of their time. what is it you want to do? knowing the answer to this would help you decide on the language you want to learn.