Nerdy programmer talk stripped from serious newbie discussion

[bigbog]

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JOVIAL:blink: ....I give up! I cannot top that... Used a little APL2 back in the early 90s.... Ruby might be in the crosshairs sometime....before the snow flies.

Steve

 

[jack97]

OK, if you going to bring up perl what about python. Last company I worked, we had a software development team that piece together alot of third party or open source modules using python.

http://www.python.org/

 

[skibum1321]

What language is best is really determined by what kind of application you're making. If you are doing web programming then a lot of the common ones are Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, JSP/Servlets, and C#. Of course then choosing a language from that list involves further determining what you need and want. For example, Perl is commonly used but there are many pitfalls to it. It was not designed for the web and is thus inefficient at sending data over http and other web specific tasks. I would say that Ruby is the best at this (used with the Rails framework) because it was designed specifically for this task. Also, PHP and Perl are scripting languages while the Java, C#, Ruby and Python are OO, which leads to different development styles and scalability factors. I could go on, but I'll leave it at that for the web languages.

A lot of the same types of differences apply to what language is your best choice for non-web apps. There are certainly languages that are more versatile than others but there is never one language that is good in all situations. And often versatile can be a bad thing if you are inexperienced. Many languages that are too versatile allow a programmer to shoot themselves in the foot if they don't know what they are doing (C pointers).

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

 

[roark]

I'll throw my nerd hat into the ring

Basic and Logo as a youngin, fortan, java, html in college, a little matlab, and I now do most of my work with SAS - maybe stretching the definition of a 'language' but coding nonetheless...