[Chester LUG] Looking to learn a language

[Les Pritchard]

Hi Stuart,

Some interesting suggestions there. I do feel I need to stick up for Java
here as lots of people like to criticise it (not here though I must add).
Java is a platform (not just a language) that enables to you build anything
from small embedded systems through desktop apps to the large scale
enterprise web applications.

It isn't as fast as something written in C or C++, but it will still be
faster than most of the interpreted languages out there. Plus compilation
provides additional error checking etc. Java is strongly typed, which I
personally prefer. I'm yet to find a reason why you may need weak typing -
maybe it's just the way I program.

The problem with Java is that it is massive. There are libraries to do so
much and that scares some people off. Also like C++ is takes a bit to get
your head around it all at first, but once you get the basics and OO in
general things like Javadoc are great.

Java is the most widely used language so as a skill it's very valuable. The
two types of development jobs that are always out there are Java & PHP, so
that's always a plus (please note I'm ignoring the .net jobs as that's
normally C# and that's just really Java anyway :-) )

Like editors, everyone has their favourites and often dislikes the
competition! I'm not saying that Java is the best for everything, but I've
programmed in it for a long time now and it's always done the job really
well. If I were to start from scratch I may consider going for C++ instead,
but that would limit me slightly. Apart from that I can't see anything else
that would be capable of what I require.

If you fancy something bleeding edge, you could always try Newspeak (
http://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html), see FLOSS weekly for an interview
with the creator by Dan.

My thoughts anyway!

Les

On 5 April 2011 08:45, Michael Crilly <mrcrilly at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Perl + Catalyst or PHP + Symfony, couple with any DB back-end you want.
>
>
> On 04/04/2011 22:42, Stuart Burns wrote:
>
> I knew someone would come up with some "odd" ones :)
>
> TBH to my mind, it is just an exercise in seeing what I can do. My day job
> is all VMware and Linux infrastructure so I don't get to do any programming
> (well powershell for vmware automation but thats about it) I can hack perl
> together if I need to.
>
> I can give you an example. I have what I think is a good idea for a
> website, but I don't currently have the skills to implement it :)
>
>
>
> On 4 April 2011 21:35, Sebastian Arcus <shop at open-t.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
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