OT - Programming Languages

[John Rumm]

It can give the wrong idea about some aspects, but the event driven model integrates quite nicely with modern GUI style programming.

[Huge]

'cos it am de troof.

[Tim Watts]

Hmm. IBM sell CICS to companies that need to do super industrial strength transaction processing. I am reliably told by an ex student who did a stint with IBM that CICS, whilst old at it's core is so utterly debugged and solid and well designed that it's still a very popular product. IBM solved the "old" by layering new technologies around the core so integrators don't need to know about "the old".

I would trust my $100million banking operation to CICS.

And in the other corner, we have some crud written in PHP. That is so going to become my new email signature once I working Mt Gox and PHP into a catchy one liner.

[Mike Barnes]

I want to write in such an environment because I'm productive, and I can bring my ideas to fruition with the minimum of distraction. Assembler has just the opposite qualities.

Unfortunately that's the environment that many programmers find themselves in.

I retired nearly twenty years ago but I still keep my hand in with home projects. I also do some work for charities in MS Access, and it's hard to get viler than that.

[WeeBob]

There appears to be many programmers round these parts.

My suggestion would be to start with JavaScript, then (once interest is established) move to Java.

Start with JavaScript because you can quickly show something in a browser, do a lot of pretty stuff. Low time investment, lots of training online, e.g.

However the Dev environment (code management, debugging etc.) is imo a bit crazy, so once the lad has demonstrated interest/ability moving to Linux + Eclipse + Java would be a good next step and could lead to developing Android apps, or even contributing to some open-source projects.

All the above software is free and, of course, JavaScript is not related to Java.

Hope that helps.

Bob

[John Rumm]

I would would be wary of anyone learning JS as a "first" language since its very sloppy concept of data types and conversions will not translate well to many other languages.

(beyond having some syntactical resemblance to C, that is about the end of the similarity IMHO)

[Mike Barnes]

Leaving aside the subjective judgements, how does it compare with the alternatives? For usefulness, I mean. It's important to accept that the world is far from ideal.

[Adam Funk]

Yabbut my point was that it's *so easy* in Scratch. Kids will bang their heads on the wall when they move to other languages.

[Huge]

Sounds like PHP is pretty dire, then. All academic anyway, because I have no intention of learning it.

[Huge]

Which is one of the reasons why IBM still sell mainframes to banks.

[Mike Barnes]

You don't seem to recognise that PHP might be "pretty dire" in some circumstances and "pretty good" in others. Context is everything and broad-brushed generalisations are often unhelpful.

You suggested assembler, which would be useless for what I want to do, but that doesn't make it "pretty dire" to me, far from it. It seems to me that PHP is "pretty dire" for your purposes, whatever they might be, but not for all purposes.

[Tim Watts]

Talking of which, I wonder how many russian mafia and other gangsters those dudes have on their tail. Surprised they are still alive.

[Huge]

Difficult to avoid subjectivity.

I'm one of the few people who came to Windows late in life (both professionally & personally). The first GUI I used was the Xerox Star (the great-granddaddy of them all), then various Unix ones (Motif, SunView, NeWS, OpenWindows). I finally got exposed to Windows at the very beginning of NT. I was appalled. It was obviously a mountain of hacks, side-effects, inconsistent UI widgets (how many kinds of 'file open' windows are there? 12? 13?). Some things were an icon, some things weren't. Even though it was all called "Windows" it was obvious that it was different pieces gaffer taped together (some of that is still visible today. Try the difference between the way Word and Excel close multiple files when you try to exit from them. Word does it right, Excel doesn't. (BTW, Word is a distant descendant of the Xerox Document Editor from the Star, whereas Excel was bought in.) Things have got steadily better over the years, but I still think Windows gets in the way too often, causing to me snort derisively when people talk about "inutitive" and Windows in the same breath - what they mean is "familiar".

And GUI designers (all of them!), please note that if an icon needs a label to tell you what kind of thing it is ("Wastebasket") then it's a shit icon.

[Tim Streater]

You mean when they enter the real world and need to do something other than "make the little characters dance around the screen & react when they bump into each other"?

[Huge]

BTW, I've been meaning to say for ages how much I like your .sig;

[Gordon Henderson]

PHP is OK. It's not brilliant and it's certinaly not the best programming language I've used either. Nor is it the worst. I have written many

1000's of lines of PHP and I'll probably write a lot more, and yes, I have read the various online documents about the design of the language

- and if you look hard enough you'll find the same documents about most programming languages.

It filled an interesting gap for web applications early on - easier than C and not as terse as perl, so it caught on. I learned PHP after I learned C - a long time after I learned C. I treat PHP as a sloppy interpreted C. (I don't use their OOP stuff at all). I think I get on OK with it because I've have experience of C and other programming languages.

Where it falls over is that it's just too easy - so you get people learning it from the start then writing huge applications with it without having a real understanding of what goes on "under the hood". I've made good money fixing other peoples PHP code - after I reeled back in horror at some of the things I've seen. (and doubled my fees)

PHP gets a bad reputation because of the apparent ease of hacking into sites written in it - the reality is that almost allways it's simply bad code (yes there have been vulnerabilities in the interpreter itself, but compared to the sheer quantity of sloppy code, there are almost insignificant) Your average modern programmer under 30 doesn't seem to appreciate exctly "how stuff works" - however maybe that's just my view as I get older!

I've actually started to use my own BASIC to write some simple scripting stuff in now. Somewhat worryingly I can call it as a CGI to a web server... Whether that's a good thing or bad remains to be seen!!!

Gordon

[Tim Streater]

Not mine, Guv. That nice Jamie on uk.comp.sys.mac made his sig file(s) available to us all when, a few months ago? (Can't remember now). Anyway, I picked out the bits I liked.

I use Thoth which serves up a sig at random from a sig folder. He *may* have a different method and have it all in a single file somehow, I'm not sure.

[Mike Barnes]

Some people find it easier to avoid than others.

I don't see any comparison with the alternatives, but if all you want's a rant, keep going by all means. Just don't expect me to respond for much longer.

Yes there are shit icons around but even the best icon in the world warrants a label because some people respond better to text than graphics.

[Bob Eager]

[Huge]

Odd, given that it's on the bottom of your postings.

:o)