What programming languages should I learn?

[Salamok]

I'm a child of the '80's so BASIC is still my first love. Anything you throw at me I can eventually do in BASIC. It won't be fast, pretty or efficient, but I can do it. For my personal taste, FreeBASIC fits my bill.

http://fbide.freebasic.net/

Contains FreeBASIC + a nice IDE. You can program in line numbers if you so need along with doing QBASIC style syntax. And compile .EXEs. Nice.

I'm futzing about with C/C++ and Python. I used to think Delphi/Object Pascal was the Second Coming but I'm over that now. 1992 has come and gone.

Java? Never could get my head around that one. It just seemed complicated for the sake of being complicated.

</2 cents>

Edit: after reading all the other posts I realize I'm the least qualified to lend any advice here. I only 'code' for recreational sake, not professional. I wish I could code like the big boys but math has always hated me and I probably couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag. Sooooo....disregard my stupidity unless you like BASIC. If you do, let's GOSUB the night away!

Basic lost it's last bit of usefulness for me when floppy disks went the way of the dodo.  It used to be occasionally useful to write an entirely self contained exe that could fit on a floppy disk, now that I have a decent sized thumb drive portable bloatware is easily acheived.

[Yegolev]

Code:

$my_var = "<li>blah blah blah</li>";

$my_var =~ s/<li>(.*)<\/li>/<li><a href="some_url">\1<\/a><\/li>/;

Personal preference, I would change the regex delimiters to avoid escaping slashes, which make me cry big fat perl-tears.  I like # or ! myself.

Code:

$myvar=~s#<li>(.*)</li>#<li><a href="some_url">\1</a></li>#;

[Shavnir]

Basically that last regex only with a href="\1" is what I ended up using.  Thanks for the advice.

Perl is considerably more fun of a language than I had anticipated.

[Trippy]

If you've just started learning Perl you might want to switch to Ruby. Ruby was partially "insipred" by Perl but it doesn't have Perl's hideous syntax and "sigilness".

[naum]

If you've just started learning Perl you might want to switch to Ruby. Ruby was partially "insipred" by Perl but it doesn't have Perl's hideous syntax and "sigilness".

Yes, writing as somebody who, for several years, coded primarily in Perl, Ruby offers all that Perl does, and so much cleaner…

Perl breaks down once you start writing complex scripts and need to use more than canned OO. OO in Perl is an abomination, as are data structure implementations that go beyond simple arrays or hashes (associative arrays)…

…I haven't had to "bless a referent" in quite some time now!

About the only thing Perl fanbois could hold over Ruby was CPAN (abundance of library code) but I think any code library you need you can find w/Ruby… …and even for that, I'd much rather still use Ruby… …if you really want to get a gander on how much more Ruby > Perl, dive into the underlying C (and standard library code written in Ruby/Perl), and there is a vast difference in simplicity, clearness, lucidity, etc.…

Not that Ruby isn't without its warts… …all programming languages suck and are replete with picadillos once you get past the toy program phase…

[Yegolev]

CPAN is probably my biggest gripe with Perl, since downloading and installing modules across all of the servers I support just isn't going to happen.  Even worse, whenever I read a "cookbook" or almost any Perl how-to, it inevitably starts with "Just get BlardyBlar from CPAN..."  Assholes.  If I had CPAN, I probably wouldn't be reading your fucking book.

I'd love to try Ruby, but it's not standard on AIX and I'm not about to go around installing it everywhere.  Perl, awk and Korn together do plenty for me, and the unnamed-hash-reference shit is doable, if nasty.

[naum]

CPAN is probably my biggest gripe with Perl, since downloading and installing modules across all of the servers I support just isn't going to happen.  Even worse, whenever I read a "cookbook" or almost any Perl how-to, it inevitably starts with "Just get BlardyBlar from CPAN..."  Assholes.  If I had CPAN, I probably wouldn't be reading your fucking book.

I'd love to try Ruby, but it's not standard on AIX and I'm not about to go around installing it everywhere.  Perl, awk and Korn together do plenty for me, and the unnamed-hash-reference shit is doable, if nasty.

Worse, once (on an AIX box, incidentally), I inherited an Perl application where the previous sysop|sysadmin|developer actually modified one of the standard library module code to perform some custom behavior… …that was not whatsoever a prudent move, as I did not make the shocking discovery until the app was migrated to another box…

Also, the automated CPAN installer always gave me nothing but grief and I always installed via manual method…

[bhodi]

At my work, we have a custom packager using the apt-get framework, and until recently I had to download and package all requested modules by hand into .pkg and .rpm.

When we moved to ubuntu server, however, I now cheat -- I simply mirror debian.cpan.org -- all the modules are packaged into .deb for me!

One of the hardest things to deal with are the huge dependency chains... Someone asks for a module and it can quickly balloon into one, two, or even three dozen modules.


Also:

[Morat20]

This seems as good a place as any -- if I wanted to much with Outlook, basically adding in some custom stuff (archiving emails to a DB, maybe addins to allow "click to bring up a DB entry associated with this email address") where would I go about starting learning this stuff?

I know it's doable, but I haven't toyed much at all with the Microsoft end of things.

[Salamok]

This seems as good a place as any -- if I wanted to much with Outlook, basically adding in some custom stuff (archiving emails to a DB, maybe addins to allow "click to bring up a DB entry associated with this email address") where would I go about starting learning this stuff?

I know it's doable, but I haven't toyed much at all with the Microsoft end of things.

VBA the good news is you can prgram it right in outlook without buying anything extra.

Alt+F11 to open the VBA editor

[Morat20]

VBA the good news is you can prgram it right in outlook without buying anything extra.

Alt+F11 to open the VBA editor

Fuck... you're telling me the easy way is Visual Basic? Why the hell hasn't Microsoft integrated C#, since it'd seem to work with the whole damn .NET thing?

[Salamok]

VBA not VB and it is right there embedded in the application how easy do you want it?  Lets see a powerful programming language customized to and embedded within the very application you are trying to dork with...

You are correct sir that is way too friggen hard, lets scrap it and write our own solution from the ground up!

[Morat20]

VBA not VB and it is right there embedded in the application how easy do you want it?  Lets see a powerful programming language customized to and embedded within the very application you are trying to dork with...

You are correct sir that is way too friggen hard, lets scrap it and write our own solution from the ground up!

It was more a note on Microsoft's inconsistancy -- and the fact that what I was looking at doing was a bit more extensive than just the Outlook addons. I can easily do all the rest in C#, I had just never mucked around with Outlook like that. So rather than one unified approach, I'm stuck with trying to make disparate pieces in at least two seperate languages play ball -- one of which doesn't play well with .NET, which is irritating because MS is all about .NET these days to prevent exactly this problem.

I see the problem is Microsoft is lagging with VSTA, which DOES happily play with .NET -- in short, I figured they were further ahead than they were.

It's not using VBA to do some piddling extra stuff with Outlook -- it's all the other stuff I want connected to it. I only asked about Outlook because, well, the other parts were pretty trivial and I made the rather stupid assumption that since I knew it could be done, and with Microsoft's blessing (rather than hacking around trying to figure out their API), that it was compatible with .NET.

I wonder how far along VSTA is.

[Murgos]

You want Visual Studio Tools for Office:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx

[Trippy]

Not that Ruby isn't without its warts… …all programming languages suck and are replete with picadillos once you get past the toy program phase…

The only wart on Ruby that bothers me is the lack of Unicode support (yes I know there are hacks and workarounds).

[Yegolev]

At my work, we have a custom packager using the apt-get framework, and until recently I had to download and package all requested modules by hand into .pkg and .rpm.

I see your point but I don't want to write a custom packager.  Neither do I want to -- or have time to -- conjure up a gold-image of a Perl install that everybody is happy with... if that's even possible.  If this sounds like fun, I'll let you know when we post another opening. 

One of the hardest things to deal with are the huge dependency chains... Someone asks for a module and it can quickly balloon into one, two, or even three dozen modules.

See, updating every server in the enterprise with new Perl modules would break more things than it fixed.  I'm currently trying to hack around a problem with two different libclntsh.a on a server that is stopping userids that aren't configured to use the complex oracle environment from calling DBD/DBI.  Tinkering with the delicate balance of modules and archive files causes much crying and backup failures.  This would be much, much easier if Perl was PERL rather than perl + hundreds of modules maintained by thousands of people.  Now I get to modify someone's env and hope they don't screw it up later.

I have been spoiled by using a commercial UNIX.  IBM takes care of all of this dependency shit for me, so if I need a fix then I install it and it works.  If I need to go up a version number, I just install it.  Missing dependencies are easy to get, but they don't usually happen since I can either DL the whole update or I can feed a LPP list to them and they give me only what I need.  I like the first one because I can then use that update anywhere, which is important when you have 200 or so servers.

[Morat20]

You want Visual Studio Tools for Office:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx

Thanks. I think we have a version of that kicking around the office I can borrow to play with. (They're very happy here to loan out development tools for professional growth. If I want to actually develop and charge for it, I have to go buy my own/download my own copy of anything -- but my boss is VERY supportive of people learning new and potentially useful stuff on our own time).

[Quinton]

Not that Ruby isn't without its warts… …all programming languages suck and are replete with picadillos once you get past the toy program phase…

The only wart on Ruby that bothers me is the lack of Unicode support (yes I know there are hacks and workarounds).

Ruby also suffers from pretty much the *worst* performance of all the popular scripting languages out there for web stuff.

It is my understanding that the Ruby model for scalability is "hope your web 2.0 app becomes popular enough that you get bought by some large company with real infrastructure that will help port your system to something else" ^^

But I hear the framework stuff (Rails) is awesome.

- Q

[Trippy]

Not that Ruby isn't without its warts… …all programming languages suck and are replete with picadillos once you get past the toy program phase…

The only wart on Ruby that bothers me is the lack of Unicode support (yes I know there are hacks and workarounds).

Ruby also suffers from pretty much the *worst* performance of all the popular scripting languages out there for web stuff.

Which really doesn't matter cause it's trivial to scale share-nothing Web apps -- it's almost always the DB that's the bottleneck.

It is my understanding that the Ruby model for scalability is "hope your web 2.0 app becomes popular enough that you get bought by some large company with real infrastructure that will help port your system to something else" ^^

No that's not the Ruby (Rails) model for scalability. Twitter had performance issues but if you look at their scaling presentation there's nothing in there about the slowness of Ruby on the Web app side of things.

[naum]

But I hear the framework stuff (Rails) is awesome.

Eh, Rails is a good fit for certain, selected subsets of web computing sphere…

The good:

* DB backed CRUD like applications easy to write and throw together, backed by ActiveRecord library

* Nice integration with AJAXy capabilities, including RJS (Rails Javascript templates)

* Migrations, easy to manage DB schema

The bad:

* Overblown and way too much cruft for many many projects…

* Becomes clunky and cumbersome when you step aside from the general paradigm of doing things - multiple DB, too tied to mySQL

* Memory/performance hog/not advised to run RoR apps on shared hosts, unlike PHP or other scripting solutions…

* A bitch to deploy, though if you can wrap your head around Mongrel/Capistrano/Subversion, can be a one click install deal, though again, not for folks on shared hosts…