[Bradford] Re-learning coding

[Alice Kaerast]

Hi,

I hate to say it, but Java is still the language of choice for dealing with
XML if you're doing it commercially in the enterprise.  Outside of that
world, languages like Go, Ruby and Python are all great choices.

I've not seen Go used commercially and don't have any experience in it, but
it's a really nice high-level language which compiles down to something as
fast as C and that compiling makes it a bit more portable.  It gets a bit
harder if you need to do anything it doesn't directly support, but I'd have
thought a bit of xml parsing would be fine.  It's also really easy to write
multithreaded code.

Ruby's very much in demand still, is really easy to learn, and is my
language of choice.  There's good tutorials to be found online (bad ones
too), including www.codecademy.com as well as lots of good screencasts
including rubytapas, railscasts.

PHP's pretty easy to learn the basics of, but harder to master than Ruby I
would say.  There's an awful lot of bad PHP developers out there you need
to contend with when looking for work.

Python is a language I do not get along well with, it's close enough to
Ruby that I should - but it just disagrees with me.  I know a few people
learning it at the moment, and it's fun mocking how difficult it is to do
basic things that Ruby can do easily.

NodeJS takes a special way of thinking to use well, its asynchronous nature
and callbacks mean it's pretty fast (but only ever single threaded) but if
you don't need that speed then maybe stick to something more traditional.

In terms of meetups, there's Node, PHP and Ruby groups in Leeds and
Manchester.  Although the Leeds Ruby group seems to be mostly about
drinking beer.

Regards
Alice



On 16 November 2013 10:38, Andrew Coulson <coulson.andy at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Good morning everyone,
>
> It's been a while since I made it over to a meeting, but hopefully I will
> manage to get over again in the New Year. In the meantime I've got a few
> ideas I'm working on that convince me I need to get back in to doing some
> coding.  Mostly I'll be tinkering around at the command line to try out
> different algorithms or ways of dealing with data (eg parsing XML in
> various ways).  I know I could use shell scripts for some of that, and may
> well do so, but want to think about taking it further and perhaps using a
> browser to present the results of whatever I'm doing so I can stay as
> platform (and OS) agnostic as possible.
>
> My programming experience stems from the eighties - BBC Basic, Pascal,
> some C, but mostly coding in 8 bit microcontrollers based around the 6802.
> So I have the fundamentals of conditional loops and such like, but entirely
> missed out on object orientation and graphical interfaces.
>
> Can anyone suggest a good language to update myself with, that could be
> applied to the ideas above? Also any suggestions of good resources to
> support the gaps in my knowledge?
>
> Thanks for your suggestions, and hopefully see you all after Christmas
>
> Andrew Coulson
> email: coulson.andy at gmail.com | tel: 07834 269850
> *Ryburn TextWorks* <http://www.ryburntextworks.co.uk> - Proofreading,
> Copy-editing, Writing
> *Ryburn ImageWorks* <http://www.RyburnImageWorks.co.uk> - Landscape and
> Nature Photography
>
>  *Sent from my IQTELL <http://goo.gl/EWViH> Virtual Workspace*
>
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