[ubuntu-us-in] Time for a change

[David Ernst]

In general I agree with the sentiments already expressed, but I'll put
my own spin on it:

It is really worth reflecting on WHY you want to program, what kinds
of things you'd like to be working on.  If you want to write device
drivers for new hardware that just hit the market, you unquestionably
want to learn C (or one of its variants).  But, you probably don't
want to do that.  You probably want to automate things that are
tedious to do by hand, and or build web interfaces that do more than
just display flat HTML.  In which case, stay away from C, imho.  

Perl and Python are both good choices.  They are both good for general
purpose automation-of-unix stuff, and they can both be used well as
backends for dynamic web pages.  I personally learned perl so long ago
that everything else feels like a foreign language to me.  I'm quite
sure I'd prefer it to Python even if I knew Python better, but they
are both good places to start, we can quibble about their relative
strengths and weaknesses after you've been programming for a while.
:)  

I personally recommend against Java.  It's been the language of choice
for academics teaching intro programming for quite a while, but I
think that's a bad thing.  Not only does the syntax generally annoy
me, but I just personally find that it's too abstract, too removed
from the things you probably are actually trying to get done.  And,
for reasons that I do not understand, every production java
application I've ever used was slow running... and kinda ugly...  I'm
not a fan of Java, I admit it.  

So, short answer: perl, or else python.  :)  

David


On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 10:28:16AM -0400, David Bell wrote:
>I would suggest Python, I have found that to be what most Ubuntu projects
>are asked to be written in, or stick with C# and use Mono! Personally I
>would say Java, but that is my language of preference and until the
>pre-installed open jdk is in all distro's it might not be a good language of
>choice.
>
>Dave Bell
>
>
>On 11/17/07, Daniel Dunn <dan.dunn.16.62 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In my busy schedule of work, being a father, being a husband, and
>> trying to let people know about Ubuntu, I have decided to learn a
>> programming language. I learned VB in highschool, and i have dabbled
>> with different languages since then, but not hing serious. I was
>> wondering from the "Experts" what language would be a good start? I
>> would love to give back to the Ubuntu community by helping to code and
>> debug projects. I had been thinking about C#, but any recommendations
>> would be helpful.
>>
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