I have neither the time, the inclination, nor the depth of knowledge
to get into a real flame-war about this, so I really hope that this
doesn't degrade to that. But, Steven's message got under my skin a
bit, so I feel I must say something....
Really, I don't think there's a simple "Learn this language, it's what
people use" answer. Here's my history in brief:
Although I'm sure it's dating myself, I'll admit that in college I
learned Pascal. At the time the "real programmers" stuck up their
noses at Pascal and raved about C. I evenutally looked into C and now
want to forget everything I saw. My favorite review of C is from
Bertrand Meyer, roughly: "C is the closest thing we have to portable
assembly language". You might be interested in doing things that
require something like portable assembly (like, say, writing hardware
drivers) you should absolutely learn C or C++. Otherwise, I say, stay
away from it. The only other good thing I can say about it is that it
makes fast programs, so applications where speed is of the
essence... yeah. But... ick.
Anyway, when the web was young everybody seemed to write their dynamic
web stuff in perl, so I learned that, because I wanted to do that.
Perl is definitely the language I'm most comfortable with at this
point. I love it for what it is, but I have been leaning against it
recently because of what it isn't, and that is a system that'll
encourage you to build a well-organized large complex application.
Perl was really invented to solve small problems quickly and easily,
and when I have a problem of that sort, I'm usually half way through
my perl script before I realize that I might have chosen a different
language. But, the Object Oriented aspects of perl are weird -- I
often say that they are somewhat cynical (read the official perl
object-oriented tutorial http://perldoc.perl.org/perltoot.html to get
a sense of what I mean). But basically, some people fell in love with
Perl so badly that they thought they should use it for everything. I
like to think that I kept my head a bit more than that, and when I
found myself fighting against the language in some applications, I
looked for other options.
When Java hit the scene in the 1990s, I bought the hype... and,
Steven, I must say, if you think Ruby is over-hyped, you're probably
not remembering what it was like when Java first came out. Java was
going to change our whole outlook on programming. It was going to be
so simple that everyone was going to start programming in it, everyone
would forget about all other languages, and, best of all, we would all
"write once, run anywhere". I bought into this at the time and
started researching Java. What I found is that is basically offered
nothing to me. I do most of my work in the world of web development
and system administration, and Java did not show me anything I was
interested in. Over time, I've only become more cynical about Java,
as nearly every java application I've had to use has been slow, ugly,
and just generally depressing to use. I suspect that some people
overcome the ugly-java tendency and I don't notice that they are java
apps... and I guess that hardware has finally caught up with Java
Virtual Machines, because I'm now less struck by everything Java
seeming so slow. So, it's probably not as bad as I think of it being.
But, suffice to say, I still have little interest in it. However, if
I was looking to write desktop applications, I'm sure I'd look into it
more. It's surely better than C.
Then everyone started talking about Python. I suspect Python is a
great language. I've barely used it. Basically, my feeling is that
if I had a project well-suited for Python, I'd probably just do it in
perl. Python's approach to object-orientation seems only slightly
less an afterthough than perl's... you still have no real support for
anything private/protected, and you still have that "explicit self"
thing (c.f. http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000501.html) which is
kinda funny in perl but more strange in Python which seems to be more
proud of its OO support. And, I must admit, I'm hung up on the
significant white space thing. I'm sure I could get over it,
but... why?
So, I turned to Ruby. Sadly, I must admit that I agree with several
of Steven's criticisms of the language: code breaking on language
updates does happen, much more often than it should... It is indeed
slower than other comparable languages. Matz should have included
utf8 support from the beginning. Having said that, it's nowhere NEAR
as bad as Steven makes it out to be. Most strange of the things
Steven said is: "recommends coding practices which are staunchly to be
avoided in *any* other language." I don't really know what he's
talking about there, but in my experience the BEST thing about Ruby is
the coding practices that it encourages. Compared to Ruby, using PHP,
Python, or Perl (or, really, C++) for OO programming seem very much
like traditional procedural languages with OO tacked on. I can only
imagine he's talking about things that other languages don't even have
(so no wonder they should be avoided!). Classic Ruby-isms like:
7.times do
whatever
end
should really make us all pause and wonder why so many languages
consider it perfectly natural to write things like
for (x = 1; x <= 7; x++) {
whatever
}
At least many languages have now copied perl's "foreach $x (1..7)"
approach, which is far more readable than the classic C-style syntax
that java (foolishly, imho) emulated.
But really, my main point about Ruby is this: Ruby has problems, but
ESPECIALLY if you're thinking of learning a language for FUN, it
should not be ruled out (much less avoided like the plague). Perhaps
Steven Black and I do very different things for fun, but most of my
fun projects do not rely heavily on long-term code-maintenance, native
UTF-support, or fastest-possible execution times. Meanwhile, Ruby
will make you rethink the ways that many programming languages do
things, and even if you never use it for a serious project, you'll
probably expand your understanding of OO programming in ways that you
won't get from most of the other languages in common use.
Having said all that, I'll again say that I can't really recommend
Ruby over Python, and they are good for similar kinds of things.
You see? You get me sucked into writing long emails! Now I'm behind
on everything else I was going to do this evening...
David
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 04:01:18PM -0500, Steven Black wrote:
>If you want a job in the computer field, learning as much Java as
>possible could be a big help. It is used extensively in the enterprise
>sector.
>
>If you want a job at IU programming, Java is *the* language to aim for.
>All IU's big projects are written in Java.
>
>Java is used heavily in the "enterprise" sector. In many cases these are
>massive in-house applications. If I remember the job sector, around here
>if you want to get programming jobs and not work in Windows, you pretty
>much are stuck with programming in Java.
>
>Java has a large enough suite of libraries that learning more about it
>will benefit you in the long run rather than adding another language
>to your belt.
>
>If you were aiming toward systems administration, then there are a
>number of languages I could point you at. However for programming...
>Unless you're going to be programming in Windows and/or writing hardware
>drivers you may as well suck it up and learn the most Java possible.
>
>A lot of open source software is written in Java. And even more software
>plays nicely with Java. For instance, MySQL's Java interface is as fast
>as the C library interface. For most other languages it is slower, as it
>needs to use the C interface for the work, but for Java it has a true
>native interface.
>
>OpenOffice heavily uses Java. If you want to script OpenOffice you can
>basically either use Java, or use some odd version of BASIC that comes
>with it.
>
>Now, if you're planning to learn a language for fun, I would recommend
>you check out Python. Python is easy to learn and use, there is a
>wide set of generally well-documented libraries for it, and one of
>my favorite things: They've not only standardized on the programming
>language, they've standardized on the *documentation* language, so all
>Python code should be documented in English.
>
>Also, if you're planning to learn a language for fun, I would recommend
>you avoid Ruby like the plague. The "best practices in the industry"
>for Ruby produces systems which are unmaintainable and unsupportable.
>(Literally, you will be unable to perform a security update, let alone
>a distribution upgrade without breaking things.) The language runs
>significantly slower than any other language in the class. (Of the
>popular set of languages, they are only faster than Prolog.) They've
>failed to adopt UTF-8 or Unicode even though the language is as old
>as the Unicode standard, and the language was invented in Japan. The
>language is poorly implimented, and recommends coding practices which
>are staunchly to be avoided in *any* other language. It is over-hyped
>to the point where a lot of people mistakenly think it is good for
>something. In truth, it is not. (Except, perhaps as a warning.)
>
>You would be better off learning brainf**k than Ruby.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainf**k (Wikipedia redirects that URL
>properly to the accurate name of the language. I have seen it called
>simply "BF".)
>
>Incase you've never heard of it. Here is "Hello World!" written in BF:
>++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++
>++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.
>
>But really, my recommendation is: If you want to make an occupation out
>of programming, learn as much Java as possible. Ideally try to make some
>nice Open Source Java program, so you can show potential employers your
>mad skills.
>
>Cheers,
>Steven Black
>
>On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 01:28:22PM -0500, Ben Shewmaker wrote:
>> I just finished my first computer science class at IU (covering Scheme), and
>> next semester the class I'm taking will be covering Unix, Emacs, and especially
>> Java. I'm wanting to push myself to learn something more at the same time
>> (eventually I would love to get involved with some sort of open source
>> project). Would it be wise to try to learn more than one language at once in
>> the first place, or would I be better served trying to learn more Java than the
>> course covers? What types of projects are developed with Java? What other
>> language would be useful to try to self learn?
>>
>> Thanks for the info and Happy New Year everybody!
>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>--
>Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
>Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E
>
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