-----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Joe Hourcle Sent: Monday, February 18, 2013 12:37 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] You *are* a coder. So what am I?
On Feb 18, 2013, at 11:17 AM, John Fereira wrote: >> I suggested PHP primarily because I find it easy to read and understand and >> that's it's very commonly used. Both Drupal and Wordpress are written in >> PHP and if we're talking about building web pages there are a lot of sites >> that use one of those as a CMS. > And if you're forced to maintain one of those, then by all means, learn PHP > ... but please don't recommend that anyone learn it as a first language. And the reason that I suggested PHP is that one is more likely going to be *forced* to learn PHP because it's so much more commonly used than something like Haskell, or R, or even Python. > I've looked at both good and bad perl code, some written some very > accomplished software developers, and I still don't like it. I am not > personally interested in learning to make web pages (I've been making them > for 20 years) and have mostly dabbled in Ruby but suspect that I'll be doing > a lot more programming in Ruby (and will be attending the LibDevConX workshop > at Stanford next month where I'm sure we'll be discussing Hydra). I'm also > somewhat familiar with Python but I just haven't found that many people are > using it in my institution (where I've worked for the past 15 years) to spend > any time learning more about it. If you're going to suggest mainstream > languages I'm not sure how you can omit Java (though just mentioning the word > seems to scare people). > It's *really* easy to omit Java: > http://www.recursivity.com/blog/2012/10/28/ides-are-a-language-smell/ I generally take articles like that with a large heaping of salt when it's fairly obvious that someone is biased against a specific language but that article seems to be more about using an IDE than using Java. In any case, I really didn't start using an IDE (I wrote all my code using a unix text editor) until several years after I learned Java. >You might as well ask why I didn't suggest C or assembler for beginners. >That's not to say that I haven't learned things from programming in those >languages >(and I've even applied tricks from Fortran and IDL in other >languages), but I wouldn't recommend any of those languages to someone who's >just learning to > program. I remember when Pascal used to be the language of choice (actually, I remember when it was Basic) as an instructional programming language, but I cut my programming teeth using assembly language (more like the raw octal representation) and Fortran before I learned C. -Joe > (ps. I'm grumpier than usual today, as I've been trying to get hpn patched > openssh to compile under centos 6 ... so that it can be called by a java > daemon that is called by another C program that dynamically generates python > and shell scripts ... and executes them but doesn't always check the exit > status ... this is one of those times when I wish some people hadn't learned > to program, so they'd just hire someone else to write it) I feel your pain. I've had plenty of days like that as well.
