Coding

[falcongrrl]

Inspired by dracomistle's mom...

Those of you who code (and you know who you are), what language do you think I should start with, if I decide to learn something? (I promise not to bug you with it. Too much.)

I'd have lots of husbandly tech support if I chose C#.

I don't really have a particular reason for doing it(unless you count insanity). It just seemed like a) a good intellectual exercise and/or b) something that might turn out to be a marketable skill.

Thanks for any insights any of you can provide. :-D

A+

Comments

[gleefulfreak.livejournal.com]

html, css, xhtml, javascript, and java, in that order.

[foxmagic.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting question!

My favorite language is Lisp, but I wouldn't wish that particular insanity on anyone else these days. :)

C# is evil. It's a Microsoftism -the language itself is controlled by an open stadards committee, but it's basically driven by Microsoft. It was created because Microsoft didn't want to have to license Java and wasn't allowed to embrace/extend/extinguish it by adding proprietary extensions.

Stick with a true open-source language; those are always the most portable and the most interesting! Perl can be fun; it has a quirky syntax and an odd way of doing things sometimes, but it's very easy to write and to test. If you're doing stuff with web pages, PHP is an extremely easy and fun language to try.

Java is popular, though I haven't learned it myself yet - it seems overly complicated. JavaScript suffered from having many different implementations in many different browsers and none of them ever completely supported it right, but I don't know what the JavaScript scene is like these days.

HTML isn't a programming language, but if you don't know HTML yet, I'd definitely say that learning it is a great place to start.

I'd be thrilled to help ya learn stuff!

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I used to teach CS at colleges, and I study programming
languages, so this is a pretty familiar question.

There are two big things to learn about programming:

(1) The core ideas about programming. There are, oh, a dozen
or so, and they're pretty easy, and if you get them, you
can get all the rest of it.

(2) The massive amounts of fancy other stuff and freakish
geekish technical chaos that comes with just about every
programming language and system. There's a huge amount
of this, and it's different for every system, and it's
pretty overwhelming the first time you meet it.

They're about equally important.

Unfortunately, most big popular languages mix a big dose of
#2 in with the #1. Which means that most of my students get
all tangled up in #2 kinds of stuff, like "what does static
mean?" (and "what does static mean here, 'cause it means X
over there and Y over yonder, but this isn't there *or*
yonder"), when they *should* be learning about things like
"variables" and "loops".

So I recommend starting with a pretty small and clean
language that has some decent textbooks for it, like
Pascal. Yeah, Pascal is an old language and not used for
much, but that's 'cause it's designed for students to learn
on, and, in lots of ways, it's pretty good for students to
learn on.

Not that Pascal is free from #2-ish things, but they're less
concentrated there than most other languages, and the #1-ish
things are cleaner and easier to see. And there are some
decent textbooks for it.

After you're vaguely comfortable with Pascal, then you
abandon it like training wheels, and go start learning some
#2-ish stuff, and then you can do more impressive things.

(Yeah, training wheels look undignified, and you don't want
them for a cross-country bike trip, but they're a good
start.)

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Right now I'm leaning towards your suggestion of Pascal.

So...where would I go to get books/compilers/etc to learn it?

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

sythyry has basically the right of it; learn the concepts and then just let the details come. Pascal's a good learning language, except for one thing: it's basically impossible to do anything terribly useful in it.

If you have any Linux machines kicking around your house, then I second the suggestion to learn Perl; it's fairly straightforward (if a little -- okay, a lot -- wonky in spots) and will let you do more with your system than just about anything else. If you've got a bunch of Windows machines kicking around (and the money to pick up a development enviornment) then I actually recommend picking up Visual Basic; it will at least let you get the basic concepts of coding (if not the more advanced ones) and provides you the quickest route to GUI-oriented programming, which in turn will offer you the strongest immediate feedback.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Python is a lot better to pick up than Perl, for a scripting language. Perl syntax is ugly, Python is very orthagonal - meaning that you won't find stuff being used twelve ways from Sunday. And best of all, Python supports a simple environment where you can just enter lines of Python code and it runs right away, instead of having to compile a program and then run it.