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On 18/02/15 22:48, Jay Bennie wrote:
One up for that. You can write badly in any language and generally anyone who says their preferred language is 'better' is saying that because they don't know the other languages or are afraid of certain keyboard characters. I should warn you that programming is an art to start with but after 20 years or so it becomes a science. But even learning a small amount is better than learning none. Once you've mastered the basics you will know pretty much most things about how almost everything goes together! Certain languages are worth learning not because they are good (or bad) but because of where they are in the ecosystem:One of the questions I asked myself and still do is "What language do I learn?" as there are so many out there and whenever you ask people, there is a different response each time, and I agree that there are too many languages, granted they do different things and work in different ways but what one does a developer chose to learn over a certain language and why....I sometimes hold the opinion that there should only be around five programming languages. Low level, interpreted, scripted, compiled, web: ASM, BASIC, Perl, C, PHPMy answer to this question is: You don't set out to learn specific languages, you start by learning the basic building blocks to solve problems using logic. As you learn more you will recognise common patterns and you will become a lego master and everything will be Awesome! but start small, with Loops, conditions and local data variables, These are the most basic logic statements that are composed into blocks that represent specific logical instructions, these in turn are composed into larger blocks to create programmes or the components of programmes that can be fitted together like lego blocks that perform specific tasks. The syntax a language, is unimportant to an extent but the choices are vast, and you can make your life easier buy concentrating initially on a class of languages that have a common syntax known as ECMA. For ease, i would advise most newbies try their hand with an ECMA language, then as they get to grips with the layers that build up a system, they will find languages at each level that use ECMA syntax and this will ease the learning of the specific enhancements in the chosen software tools, by this I mean compilers, runtimes, parsers etc. You should also learn SQL. SQL is a language, but its not a programming language per se, it is language to read, edit and remove data. Its not obligatory, but the vast majority of paid software work involves a lot of data! and with data comes presentation, so as a starting point, learn HTML, its friend CSS and the ECMA language; Javascript. When you can do that Node, C# and Java are ECMA languages in the next layer(the web server) and C/C++ on the server itself with ASM at the lowest level, it is best used with C. If you can master these you can write software that targets everything from the raw hardware to the UI of a mobile phone.
Javascript cos its in the web browser and so everywhere; PHP cos its in a lot of web servers as is SQL.C as its very common in Linux programs and C++ which may scare you at first but I've found that almost everything else uses C++ libraries to do the really gritty stuff! Remember that a journey of a thousand miles* starts with a single step and keep going - the exercise in itself becomes fun after a while!
Tom te tom te tom * but when you get there you realise there's a way to go yet. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq