Best Programming Language

spite42o said:

unlike other posts... c++ was based on a joke made one night drunk at a bar... so do not go with that crap ;x if you really want power... c#.net is definitely your choice it will carry you through web apps, desktop apps, anything your lil heart can desire... do not waste your time with vb, it is complete garbage...


pm me anytime, ill show you why ;D

< c#.net developer

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You really don't understand what you're talking about. The perfect analogy for what you're suggesting is trying to learn Warren Buffet's strategies by speaking to an artificial model based solely upon his quotes and public advices. You won't ever be talking to the real Warren Buffet, except playing with a virtual half-competent and limited copy of his existence. All languages are capable for their purpose (general purpose or domain specific) but what you said could be misleading, since c# and c++ require about the same effort in learning and implementing, with c# "beating" c++ with a few domain-specific perks, perks made for lazy programmers if you wish to compare it to c++. Now, since the OP is interested in the nearest programming language to accomplish programming "BH" applications, rebol, php, perl, and python are the nearest domain specific languages with their parsing capabilities. Python got soap and PHP got curl, rebol is an English-like domain specific language altogether and it seems to be created for HTTP, and other protocols rather than general purpose applications - which you appear to want. Perl, is just like PHP with many CPAN modules. Good luck. When you want a general programming package, go with c++.

spite42o said:

honestly if you have no experience with programming either vb.net or c#.net is the way togo, but i do not recommend vb to anyone with half a brain ;x

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VB is the worst choice for a beginner as is C or C#. You need to learn programming structure and a little bit of elegance before you go hacking away in languages as convoluted as C#.

As for VB I won't even go there, just google what other people say, try this...

I've made some basic scrapers with Kornshell. If these are for personal use and you don't mind working from command-line, shell scripting will work pretty well b/c you have easy-access to tools like curl and wget. You also have access to manipulation libraries like sed and awk. And using a database from shell is about as straight-forward as you can get.

Add Perl to the mix and you can do more. I've written several Perl scripts that call several different shell-scripts when the functionality required had already been written or when it was just easier to write that piece in shell as opposed to Perl.

BTW, I know that PHP is being recommended a lot here. Unless you're writing web applications, however, I don't think PHP is appropriate. PHP is supposed to be integrated with HTML. PHP is sort of like the old monolithic JSPs before Java-Web programmers learned the Model-View-Controller pattern and replaced Java code in JSPs with tags and created monolithic web-frameworks like Struts ...

But I digress.

If you're amenable to Linux/Unix, start out with shell-scripting and Perl, and you'll be able to figure things out from there.

By the way, if you value your sanity, stay away from Object Oriented Perl --- it's the Cthulhu of programming languages.

Different people have different needs and wants.

So there is no best programming or worst programming language, they were all created with their purpose.

Programming language evolves every now and then, best bet is to focus on "Best language programming" and not on "best programming language" trap.... there is no end to it.

HelloInsomnia said:

Whats the best programming language to start learning if I want to make my own tools in the future?

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As Rendias pointed out, there's no "best" or "worst" programming language. Often times, when people compare programming languages, they are trying to compare apples to oranges. What language you "should" learn depends not only on what you want to accomplish (as there may be many suitable languages), but also what your budget and long-term vision are.

When it comes to programming, my personal preferences are VB.NET (vastly different from VB, so don't dismiss it just because it has "VB" in its name), ASP.NET, and T-SQL. However, I often use PHP/MySQL because of its cost effectiveness. I would love to go out there and build all of my sites using ASP.NET with a SQL Server backend, but that would be quite expensive to maintain. Most Windows-based hosting is more expensive than Linux-based hosting, and having a SQL Server database usually costs extra, whereas most Linux hosts offer unlimited MySQL databases with your account.

On the matter of speed...

To anyone saying that .NET is slow, .NET applications can be made to be screaming fast. It all comes down to one's knowledge and skill as a programmer. Many applications (whether .NET or not) that run poorly are the result of not the language or platform, but the incompetence of the programmers. Just because something can be coded in a certain way doesn't mean that it should.

On the matter of C#.NET vs. VB.NET...

With very few exceptions, you can accomplish the same thing in VB.NET as you can in C#.NET and vice versa. In fact, an app coded in one of these languages can easily be translated, line by line, into the other language (with very few exceptions, like I said before). When people say that one or the other is "better", their remarks usually have more to do with their emotions, self-image, peer pressure, etc. than anything objective.

For what you're looking to do (scrapers, harvesters, bots), this can all be done with done with .NET. Although I obviously prefer .NET, my recommendation to you would be to start off with PHP/cURL to make your scrapers, etc. There's an excellent book that was shared by bbyte in the following thread that may help you out:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...y-tool-scrape-threads-forum-post-another.html

That No-Starch Press book on Web-bots, spiders, etc. is actually a good read ...


Worth the effort even though it's geared toward PHP.

Just to represent the java side a little more:

Java is nowadays a language for highly complex projects and widely used. I read in some site that almost half of the freelance jobs are asked in java - mostly J2EE-projects admittedly.
It is also used in numerical computing and has a integer performance very similar to C/C++. Floating point performance (very unspecific statement, I know) is less. I use it for computational fluid dynamics and can say: the some percent the language is slower is easily compensated by the much lower development time. If I am unhappy for the missing 10-20%, I just ask for an additional computer.

Make yourself the calculation: use C/C++ and have at least 100% development time or much more. Or buy a quad-core instead of a dual-core and be even faster for some extra bucks. If you btw want to program btw BH apps like reg bots: you will need to use multi-threading and this is pure horror in C++.

The choice of programming language is partly a religion. In most cases the discussion unspecificly still goes on because of people of the good old school who are convinced that hard work is the best work. If you are interested in more, just search my threads, I once gave a longer statement about java. Or search google and for java 1.1 and believe the opposite

Ok, this was a pure java post negelecting other languages. I'd say for BH .net is also a very good option. But take some time to make your decision.

I will almost repeat the reason everyone else advised, Vb.net is a great start. Will teach you fundamentals, basic fundamentals of programming, Its a good start to learn other languages later on.

Best way to start if you dont have the option in school is get a book. do the examples. try youtube to see live examples.

Another way would be to try vtc.com they have a trial for 30 days of there visual tutorials. Same with Lynda.com. But lynda.com only offers 1day trial. but they are pretty good

@cooooookies --- You were supposed to keep Java a secret man! Don't you go to the meetings!?

Oy!

Seriously, though. I agree Java is good for heavy-duty projects like cooooookies is talking about, but at work even though I'm officially a Java programmer when it came time to scrape some government sites for automotive-data (we used to have someone copying and pasting before!), I threw together a shell-script that scraped the data from the sites, one page at a time and put it in cron. It took me about an hour and a half.

The script has been running for years with only minor tweaks required when one state or another changed their HTML formatting.

I also wrote shell scripts that scraped some commercial sites and produced CSVs for Excel. Again, these scripts can be thrown together very quickly. But if you want something more sophisticated than CSV output, you have to start looking at either Perl and its XML and Excel formatting libraries, or Java with stuff like Castor or POI.

I've done Castor and POI --- Castor is annoying, but POI can be fun ... if you look at it the right way.

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What to conclude, then? I don't know about Windows programming, so if you're programming Windows, listen to the Windows experts here. If you're programming on Linux/Unix though you should add shell-scripting to your tool-box. It gets the job done quickly.

Perl works well for things that are slightly more heavy-duty and for String manipulations. Perl also gives you access to arrays and hashmaps (after a fashion ...). It's a dynamically typed language, which bugs me sometimes, but then again ... I'm a curmudgeon.

PHP appears to be today's lingua franca for the web, and that Starch Free Press book mentioned before is a pretty good introduction to exactly what you want to do (spidering, scraping, etc.). IF it were me, I'd start with PHP/MySQL --- I'd be up and running quickly.

I am partial to Java, but that's because it's my bread and butter language. Plus it's statically typed, does a good job with threads, and it doesn't make me think about memory management ... much. It works for big projects, and plays nice even in Windows.

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And btw, if you're interested in learning the fundamentals of programming, learn LISP. Once, you've learned it and used it, you will be a better programmer. Period.

Ooof, there's a lot of nonsense in this thread.

For web stuff PHP is the most widely used - so like castor above, if it were me I'd start with PHP/MySQL.

As for C# vs C++ - it's simple. Unless you REALLY need maximum performance (as in you're developing graphic intensive apps or games, or highly cpu intensive mathematical models), the performance difference is negligible - and in fact has more to do with the programmer than the language. What is very noticeable however is how quickly you can build applications. C# is just shitloads faster. If you really wanted to go down this route I'd highly recommend C# over c++ unless you had some very specific requirements that would justify the longer development cycle.