[SWLUG] Programming language for a dummy

[Bradley, Peter]

IMHO all programming languages have the following parts:

*  The basic language
*  The bits bolted onto the basic language that reflect the main reason
why the language was devised
*  The libraries and other bits that extend the functionality of the
language

The first of the above is easy.  All languages (with the possible
exception of LISP!) do pretty much the same things:

*  Allocate memory (usually implicitly via data structure declarations -
including scalar variables)
*  Process commands one after the other
*  Loop
*  Branch

That's it, pretty much.

The bits bolted on make it easy for you to do certain things that the
language designer had in mind when designing the language.  So Perl has
lots of stuff to help you manipulate streams of bytes (of one type or
another) like matching, finding, replacing and so on.  PHP has lots of
stuff that makes it easy to do Web page development stuff - like
dropping in and out of PHP mode into HTML mode wherever you like.  Just
choose a language that is oriented towards the kind of manipulations you
are interested in.

The third bit, the libraries, are what give languages their power.  Pick
a language that has libraries for the sort of stuff you want to do.

As you suspected, learning the libraries is the hard part.  You can't
avoid it, though, whatever language you pick: but that's just my humble
opinion.

I do Perl and PHP myself (and I've looked at Python).  If people pay me
enough, I also do C#.

Cheers


Peter
http://www.peredur.net



-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at swlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at swlug.org] On
Behalf Of matt at matthewmoore.org.uk
Sent: 30 July 2010 15:59
To: discuss at swlug.org
Subject: [SWLUG] Programming language for a dummy

Hello all,

I'm looking for recommendations for an easy to learn and idiot proof
programming language.  I have two main requirements for this language:

1 - I do a lot of fiddling with spreadsheets and text files with lots of
networking stuff in them, to produce stats and the like.  It would be
nice
if it's easy to read in, combine and filter stuff like that.  Scripting
stuff basically.

2 - I'd like to do some web dev stuff, so again it would be nice if it's
easy and convenient to get started.

The more handholding in terms of hiding annoying things (eg stuff like
CPAN
modules and the like) the better really.

I guess I could just 'pick one' but I'm just looking for some
recommendations.

Cheers,

Matt

_______________________________________________
SWLUG Discussion List - Discuss at swlug.org
http://swlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss