[Chester LUG] Looking to learn a language

[Sebastian Arcus]

On 04/04/2011 08:53 PM, Richard Smedley wrote:
> On 04/04/11 18:44, Stuart Burns wrote:
>> I just thought I would drop an email to ask for some advice re: programming
>> languages to learn. Now that I have time on my hands (at last) I am looking
>> to learn  a language that can be used for both web development as well as
>> locally on the PC.
>
> 1. JavaScript.
>     No, seriously, it is a proper language.
>     Take a look at:
> http://eloquentjavascript.net/
>     (&  you can move on to node.js afterwards :)


In that case, I suppose an option for programming local apps would be 
the XULrunner platform from Mozilla. It is what Firefox and Thunderbird 
is built on. You program the interface in XUL (which is a mark-up 
language, quite easy to understand), and the logic in Javascript. I 
found it all quite interesting, and the multiplatform aspect helps. 
However, few months ago when I tried it, the printing feature was a bit 
of a major PITA - so I started looking elsewhere. I liked most 
everything else though. It only has access to SQLite databases at the 
moment, but there was talk of implementing an ODBC driver which would 
allow connections to a lot of other RDBMS's though.

Sebastian