which language should you learn?

jazzc said:

Ruby + Python together < 1%.

Click to expand...

Starting language wars is never really a smart thing to do, it's in most cases pointless and wastes people's time (don't get me wrong I'm not saying you are). But here's my humble opinion on the subject :

PHP is certainly by far the most popular scripting language out there, miles ahead of Python and Ruby. In my opinion it boils down to a few things : wide and easy hosting available for all, brain dead simple to get started with (which is one of it's big drawbacks since it leads to spaghetti code -> PHP mixed with HTML).
I actually do code in PHP for some of my projects, it's a tool like any other, it's never really the tools fault more often bad code is written by bad programmers regardless of the tools at hand.

I "dislike" PHP, for it's lack of structure, even the naming convention of core functions is really messed up. Most PHP code out there, is of a really bad quality, it's simplicity is its weakness since it attracts many bad coders -> sloppy code.

I'm not a big fan of Ruby, it's just another language/tool, that I would use I "needed" to.

You might have guessed that out of the 3, Python is my favourite (funnily enough I disliked it a lot to start off with). Python is really a beautiful language, the std libraries respect naming conventions (you rarely waste time looking up names), it's well structured (indentation gives it visual structure), it's widespread so there are a lot of clean well designed libraries available.
For web development Python has a few good frameworks (Pyramid, Django, Webpy, etc ...), I use django but also write a lot of vanilla Python code, but Django itself is really a very nice framework to use, it's clean, structured, modular, provides a clean and easy to use ORM, templating engine, caching framework ...

I've really only covered scripting languages here, I myself come from a system's development background (Assembly, C, C++), but I'm comfortable writing code in Asm, C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PHP and Python. The point is : the language doesn't really matter, if you don't know what you are doing (from an algorithmic point of view or from a technical point of view) you'll be damned no matter what language you learn/use. Ideally one should learn "how to program" (data structures/algorithms) before learning a programming language.

Regards

jazzc said:

@c0ntenth|ef

Nothing at that page and what you mentioned claims (unlike you) that Ajax is a "javascript library". You need to learn what a library is in programming languages.

If you somehow think that I believe or claim that Javascript is somehow inferior to anything, you are wrong. What I am saying is that calling Ajax a library is technically 100% wrong.

Click to expand...

i know what ya said, but the thread here is about what languages to learn and some dude above said javascript is shit and my point was that if somebody wants to do web development then javascript is vital because then they get to easier get into jquery and ajax that are popular, and ajax isn't in the javascript library but javascript plays an important role in it.

jazzc said:

Do you base that on numbers or just a hunch?



Source: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

Ruby + Python together < 1%.

Click to expand...

i am a php fan myself and you can google about it some who compare those 2 languages to php and have switched over in using them over php

depends what you wanna do, work for others=php, work for yourself, there are better options


who said JS is shit is a retard, it is way faster than all those other languages. node.js

I didn't want to start language war, i slapped JavaScript because i don't like when i must use something i don't want, when i have no choice, and you have no choice when you work with client scripting.

@c0ntenth|ef
Ok, do you know any other client scripting language which can be used in default IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari installation?
google maps,gmail,yahoo use JavaScript because they must, not because they want.

@Rushdie
Why insults? Did you even read my post? JS is faster than, what?

@c0ntenth|ef, @Rushdie
Memory consumption, memory leaks, slowness, browser crashing is why i think JavaScript VM is shit.
Ugly language syntax, hacking language to made it into something which isn't intended in the first place is why i think JavaScript is shit.
Let developers have choice, give them PythonScript, RubyScript ..., so we'll see how JavaScript is good.

And in the end, why they make Dart language if JavaScript is so good?

thousands of people you JS by choice. it is(node.js) a magnitude faster than python and ruby

dart is a failure programming wise. google created it to controll more market.

sorry for the insult. ok not a retard, but i think you dont know whats going at the moment at the programming scene. im not saying JS replaces everything (if it had a framework like rails it would imo), but its way faster than other langs and is the future of programming imo. for me i use ruby cause i dont need that much speed and its more friendly than node, but i envy node developers everyday.

node turns out better even than PyPy in many benchmarks. (a magnitude better). not in all cases ofc, but most.

http://blog.raducojocaru.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/nodejs_vs_apache-php.png

of course JS is not perfect, but developing a new language is a very long process so were destined for JS for now.


and you cant say that it is a horrible, ugly language, node.js has a beautiful syntax and all the libs like other langs, ex.


http://www.stoimen.com/blog/2010/12/02/diving-into-node-js-a-long-polling-example/

https://github.com/languages - check out all the cool projects in JS and look at the source

https://github.com/joyent/node

What blocks Ruby, Python to get Javascript V8 speed?

Nothing.

Well, okay: money. (And time, people, resources, but if you have money, you can buy those.)

V8 has a team of brilliant, highly-specialized, highly-experienced (and thus highly-paid) engineers working on it, that have decades of experience (I'm talking individually - collectively it's more like centuries) in creating high-performance execution engines for dynamic OO languages. They are basically the same people who also created the Sun HotSpot JVM (among many others).

Lars Bak, the lead developer, has been literally working on V8 for 25 years, which is basically his entire (professional) life (and V8's, too). Some of the people writing Ruby VMs aren't even 25 years old.

Are there any Ruby / Python features that are blocking implementation of optimizations (e.g. inline caching) V8 engine has?

Given that at least IronRuby, JRuby, MagLev, MacRuby and Rubinius have either monomorphic (IronRuby) or polymorphic inline caching, the answer is obviously no.

Modern Ruby implementations already do a great deal of optimizations. For example, for certain operations, Rubinius's Hash class is faster than YARV's. Now, this doesn't sound terribly exciting until you realize that Rubinius's Hash class is implemented in 100% pure Ruby, while YARV's is implemented in 100% hand-optimized C.

So, at least in some cases, Rubinius can generate better code than GCC!

Or this is rather matter of resources put into the V8 project by Google.

Yes. Not just Google. V8 is 25 years old now. The people who are working on V8 also created the Self VM (to this day one of the fastest dynamic OO language execution engines ever created), the Animorphic Smalltalk VM (to this day one of the fastest Smalltalk execution engines ever created), the HotSpot JVM (the fastest JVM ever created, probably the fastest VM period) and OOVM (one of the most efficient Smalltalk VMs ever created).

In fact, Lars Bak, the lead developer of V8, worked on every single one of those, plus a few others.

Click to expand...