I'm a programming newbie!



  • I've been developing in PHP and ASP on the web for a while but I wanted to get into some other types of languages.

    I want to learn a new language but I don't really know where to start.  Whats a good programming language to start learning?  I'm not really sure what sort of things I want to create, I just want my programming knowledge to grow outside of just web development.



  • hmm, python, ruby or maybe C# ?



  • <FONT face=Arial>C# or Java would probably be the most painless to learn.</FONT>



  • I agree, C# and Java are good choices. Not too difficult to learn, relatively clean syntax (compared to e.g. PHP) and often used in real-world projects (therefor: likely to provide many job opportunities)



  • I think vb.net would be your best option.  You can get everything you need to create anything from database-driven web applications to web services to full-blown desktop apps for free.

    The syntax will be familiar to you, since you probably used vbscript with asp.  Too many curly braces, brackets, and other new conventions will only serve to slow you down when you're trying to get to know the environment.

    The biggest plus you'll get is an easy way to approach object-oriented programming, since you may not have gotten a whole lot of structure with php/asp.

    Finally, the ide will go a long way to get you jump-started.  You can get the skeleton for any of those apps and some other interesting things(services, libraries, and good 'ol console apps) with the click of a button.  I'm not an advocate of relying on the ide heavily, but this will save you a ton of frustration trying to get your code running.  You can always come back later and figure out how to hand-code all this stuff and compile it on the command line.

    As a post-script, you may have noticed a lot of people here really like .net.  You will be officially cool if you use .net, and instantly gain the respect of your peers.  Programming in .net may also make your teeth whiter, but this is only conjecture.



  • @Eric Shinn said:

    <FONT face=Arial>C# or Java would probably be the most painless to learn.</FONT>

    Compared to Python or Ruby, both C# and Java generate extreme pain in both the brain and the rear.



  • @technites said:

    The language doesn't matter so much, the concepts are what's important. Like you said, you want your knowledge to grow - If you're not familiar with object-oriented programming, I'd strongly suggest reading up about it.

    It also depends on your priorities and how much time you have. Ruby or Python are more immediate and fun to learn. If you're more concerned about having marketable skills, go for Java/C#.

     I agree. I know a variety of languages, and they all have things in common such as loops, functions, arrays, etc. Learn the concepts first, and the syntax last. When you know the basic concepts, you can easily pick up new languages just by learning the syntax.
     



  • @ammoQ said:

    I agree, C# and Java are good choices.

    For now.

    If you have been following current market trends, PHP is on the upswing.

    It will be the language of the future.

    If you doubt me, take a gander at Monster.com. 



  • From Monster, 8 languages across 8 regions:

    <COLGROUP> <COL style="WIDTH: 144pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 7021" width=192> <COL style="WIDTH: 53pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2596" width=71> <COL style="WIDTH: 53pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2560" width=70> <COL style="WIDTH: 51pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2486" width=68> <COL style="WIDTH: 58pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2816" width=77> <COL style="WIDTH: 51pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2486" width=68> <COL style="WIDTH: 50pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2413" width=66> <COL style="WIDTH: 50pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2450" span=2 width=67>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Java</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>C++</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>C#</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>VisualBasic</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>Perl</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>PHP</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>Cobol</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>Fortran</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Bellevue/Redmond, WA</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>45</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>85</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>134</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>49</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>33</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>2</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>0</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>San Jose, CA</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>136</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>175</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>28</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>27</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>79</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>36</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>2</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Denver, CO</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>64</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>35</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>30</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>29</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>20</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>7</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>3</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Austin, TX</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>60</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>44</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>43</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>24</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>9</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>2</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Houston, TX</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>39</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>36</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>47</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>46</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>8</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>4</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>4</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>New York City, NY</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>205</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>156</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>115</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>70</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>90</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>32</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>3</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Boston, MA</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>194</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>159</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>80</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>71</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>80</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>21</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>4</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>2</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>Raleigh/Durham, NC</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>74</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>71</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>39</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>35</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>29</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>12</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>7</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>1</FONT>
    <FONT face=Calibri>TOTAL</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>817</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>761</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>516</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>351</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>348</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>116</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>22</FONT> <FONT face=Calibri>11</FONT>

     



  • @CPound said:

    @ammoQ said:

    I agree, C# and Java are good choices.

    For now.

    If you have been following current market trends, PHP is on the upswing.

    It will be the language of the future.

    If you doubt me, take a gander at Monster.com. 

    PHP is too limited in its scope to play in the same league like Java und C#; besides that, the language is ugly by design, and I doubt they will ever be able to fix it. It can't deny its origins as a quick-and-dirty script language hack.



  • COBOL 22?  Fortran 11?  Good to know that if you guys snap up all the Java and C++ jobs I can still go back to my experience of 30 years ago.  And if those jobs get taken I suppose someone somewhere wants to hire an IBM 029 operator.

     



  • @CPound said:

    If you have been following current market trends, PHP is on the upswing.

    It will be the language of the future.

    If you doubt me, take a gander at Monster.com. 

    Gee, thanks, now I have to clean milk off my monitor. Do you have any idea what a pain it is to polish these things? 



  • @asuffield said:

    Gee, thanks, now I have to clean milk off my monitor. Do you have any idea what a pain it is to polish these things? 

    Don't get me wrong, I am no PHP advocate. I'm just saying it's on the rise again.

    I used to program in PHP back in what...1998/1999? It was OK. I remember the talk back in those days that PHP was going to save the world and whatnot...it was a bit dramatic to say the least.

    People are talking about it again. Some say it's the "wave of the future". Being that it is a "language of the past", I don't really understand that.

    Would anyone like to comment on this? Are you guys hearing the same things? 



  • @CPound said:

    People are talking about it again. Some say it's the "wave of the future". Being that it is a "language of the past", I don't really understand that.

    Would anyone like to comment on this? Are you guys hearing the same things? 

    A lot of people know PHP well and use it, so PHP has its market share. That said, I cannot see in which respect PHP would be superior to other languages. In fact, it's rather uninspired and ugly. But it works, is readily available on web hosting farms, so people use it and will continue to do so.



  • About me:

    Visual Basic since version 3
    Java since it's beta
    C# since the .NET beta
    One of the leads on a large e-commerce site in Java / J2EE
    Currently make my living writing C# code and designing integrations between C# and Java apps
    Co-author of a VB.NET book
    Contributing author on a C# book and co-author of a C# book

     I'm telling you this only so you understand that, even if I don't know my shit, I probably at least can stumble through one of those languages enough to get a job done.

    I am currently learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails (a domain specific language on top of Ruby) and I will probably do all of my personal development with Rails. In two days of playing with the language, I've come to realize there's enough promise there that it's worth pursuing and I'm starting to feel as proficient in that language as I am in C#. Granted, I still need to push the envelope and get discouraged and frustrated over not being able to figure stuff out, but so far, I'm impressed.

    If you want to learn a language that you can have a lot of fun in, be productive, and be able to land a job at some shops that just 'get it' (like some people I know that like people that know Scheme or Common Lisp even though it's a C# shop), then check out Ruby. Ruby's loosely-typed language and template syntax will let you feel right at home with regards to your PHP/ASP background.

    On the other hand, if you want any hope of landing a job at a large company with one of the more in-demand languages, then learn ASP.NET with C#. ASP.NET because it's pain threshold, in my opinion, is lower than JSP. C# because it's then a somewhat more painless conversion to Java. You'll need to learn to type in proper-case for both and design patterns are easier to mentally translate. VB.NET is a good option too, but I don't think you can go wrong learning C#.



  • @webzter said:

    About me:

    Visual Basic since version 3
    Java since it's beta
    C# since the .NET beta
    One of the leads on a large e-commerce site in Java / J2EE
    Currently make my living writing C# code and designing integrations between C# and Java apps
    Co-author of a VB.NET book
    Contributing author on a C# book and co-author of a C# book

    Where is your PHP experience? 



  • @CPound said:

    Where is your PHP experience? 

    Hiding back in a corner where we don't talk about it... same as my c/informix/vms experience



  • @cronthenoob said:

    I've been developing in PHP and ASP on the web for a while but I wanted to get into some other types of languages.

    I want to learn a new language but I don't really know where to start.  Whats a good programming language to start learning?  I'm not really sure what sort of things I want to create, I just want my programming knowledge to grow outside of just web development.

    I would whole heartedly recommend staying away from VB for now.

    Pick up Java or C#. Or if you are industrious venture into C++.

    While VB is easy, it can teach you some bad habits that you might have problems breaking later on.

     


  • FoxDev

    .... do we have another import running or something? because this was marked as a new thread for me.....



  • C\1 is a great language!


  • FoxDev

    well yes, but that's not the point of my question. :-P


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    .... do we have another import running or something? because this was marked as a new thread for me.....

    No. Looks at the topic number: 9739. This one's been here for a while. And we're way past 2006. No clue why it would show up for you all of the sudden.



  • @cronthenoob, it's nine years later, how did things turn out?
    Are you @cronthe1337haxor now?



  • What the...

    Is everyone actually typing C\1 here or is C# not rendering properly on my phone?

    Edit:
    Okay, it rendered in my own post so I'll assume that C\1 is some super popular language that I've never heard of, or some type of in-joke.


  • BINNED

    Or... wait for it... failed regex replacement!

    \1 being the first backreference, probably trying to replace # with an entity to

    #avoid this shit



  • @Oscar_L said:

    I think vb.net would be your best option. You can get everything you need to create anything from database-driven web applications to web services to full-blown desktop apps for free.

    "VB.net is the future, man!"
    -- guy from 2006

    @Oscar_L said:

    As a post-script, you may have noticed a lot of people here really like .net. You will be officially cool if you use .net, and instantly gain the respect of your peers. Programming in .net may also make your teeth whiter, but this is only conjecture.

    TIL in 2006, all the tech hipsters where getting into .NET instead of running away.

    @CPound said:

    If you have been following current market trends, PHP is on the upswing.It will be the language of the future.

    I'll be damned if this guy didn't hit nail on the head.

    @CodeWhisperer said:

    From Monster, 8 languages across 8 regions:

    This is the table @CodeWhisperer originally posted:

    Compared to today, C# caught up with Java and remained there, Visual Basic disappeared, Perl slid down and PHP shot up. I don't think the last two even appear any more in official job adds.

    @webzter said:

    I am currently learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails (a domain specific language on top of Ruby) and I will probably do all of my personal development with Rails. In two days of playing with the language, I've come to realize there's enough promise there that it's worth pursuing and I'm starting to feel as proficient in that language as I am in C\1. Granted, I still need to push the envelope and get discouraged and frustrated over not being able to figure stuff out, but so far, I'm impressed.

    If you want to learn a language that you can have a lot of fun in, be productive, and be able to land a job at some shops that just 'get it' (like some people I know that like people that know Scheme or Common Lisp even though it's a C\1 shop), then check out Ruby. Ruby's loosely-typed language and template syntax will let you feel right at home with regards to your PHP/ASP background.

    The birth of the RoR. Amazing.


    I loved reading these. A glimpse into the past.


  • BINNED

    So... If we assume we're at good as guessing as these guys, we all agree that we're going to see Node, Node, and more Node?

    Also, NoSQL seems to be slowly getting replaced with traditional RDBMS (but using stuff like jsonb and hstore to provide the nice bits of NoSQL databases), so that probably won't keep climbing, IMHO...



  • @Onyx said:

    So... If we assume we're at good as guessing as these guys, we all agree that we're going to see Node, Node, and more Node?

    Yes, javascript seems to be in the upswing now, so it's dragging node.js with it.

    Taken on its own merit, node.js has a LOT of creaky API-s and questionable workflows. I'm not sure it would be as ubiquitous without javascript.

    And what about javascript? The era of evergreen browsers is here. I'm pretty sure every new version of chrome and firefox achieves 90% adoption within a few weeks. And now MS Edge will be like that too.

    So what happens if two of those players make a deal and the next version of their browsers suddenly has a whole new programming language support. 2 weeks later, there's suddenly a new programming language able to compete with javascript in terms of the number of web users reached.

    Is javascript still the number one language then?

    2010-s might be the decade of javascript, but I'm not so sure 2020-s will be too.



  • Holy cow. I don't even remember asking this question. I actually ended up getting a degree in computer science. I'm an application developer for the U.S. postal service.

    I wouldn't say I'm 1337 but I'm pretty decent.



  • @cronthenoob said:

    Holy cow. I don't even remember asking this question. I actually ended up getting a degree in computer science. I'm an application developer for the U.S. postal service.

    I wouldn't say I'm 1337 but I'm pretty decent.

    Glad to have you back, @cronthedecent.

    Filed under: reserving @cronthe1337 just to mess with you



  • Reading tech articles or discussions from the past can be seriously educational.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Is javascript still the number one language then?

    Shit, you'll see the biggest migration of programmers in the history. Now, I hope it's something fun and weird, like Haskell or Rust.



  • Wow, this is a genuine (good) WTF? Who would have thought I'd see a post I don't even remember from nearly 10 years ago rise from the distant past? Thanks for carrying the torch all these years.

    I suppose one good prognostication deserves another. I'm slinging data at a bank these days and what I've learned since I started coding mercenary style 16 years ago still pays the bills, though it comes in a different form.

    Javascript still comes up periodically. Once and possibly still derided as the "assembly language of the internet", I still see it as just like knowing how a car works. No matter what you pile on top of it, it's going to break down. When that day comes, you'll be grateful for the ability to pop that hood, figure out what's wrong and come out looking like Gandolf when you fix it to the amazement of the PFYs gathered 'round.

    Don't forget to rehearse your monologue about how the keyboards used to be mechanical and the coding happened uphill both ways in a blizzard.



  • @Oscar_L said:

    keyboards used to be mechanical

    Mine still is...


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