Programming languages that you love/hate/or they interest you

jesusphreak

A few years back I tried to learn PHP. That was pretty much a disaster. I was a bit younger at the time and I didn't understand a lot of the concepts. About a year ago, I did some really crappy hacks to a PHP CMS that was around, and so I was able to understand the basic jist of how things worked.

Starting about 2 months ago, though, I started to learn Ruby on Rails. Rails has a lot of more advanced Ruby concepts in it, so some of it has been confusing, but its mostly been a joy, and I think I can finally call myself a programmer at this point.

Ruby is just a beautiful language. The syntax doesn't get in your way, the code does what you would expect, and the best word for it is that it is elegant.

On the other hand, I've recently been interested in learning Python, but I've never gotten around to it. I know Google uses it and I know it has a pretty rabid fanbase, so it is something that has always interested me.

And then PHP...well...PHP....after finally understanding programming with Ruby, I've decided within this past week that I may as well pick up a PHP book I've had for awhile and actually learn something out of it. Mainly because I know that PHP support is widespread, some neat things like PHP-GTK are being developed, and mainly that I'd like to be able to write extensions for Vanilla - as that is the only way I'm ever gonna be able to get my users to transition over to this. Getting into the book, I really understand things now...it all makes sense, and the proverbial "switch" in my head has finally flipped....but PHP itself is just an ugly language. Going from Ruby to PHP is like going from a beautiful diamond to a piece of plastic. PHP just straight up has some nasty syntax and it just feels awkward.

I'm confident that learning a few languages will make be a better programmer in any language I use, and it'll obviously make me more useful. So what about you guys? What langauges do you love, hate, or find very interesting?

dknowles

I always enjoyed c++, but I tend to put $'s in front of variables because I've programmed so much PHP in my day. I'm especially having this problem right now, because I'm having to do a project for school in c++.

i really enjoy PHP, although I wish there were some more consistency between function names and such.

perl is really freaking cool, but confuses the hell out of me. there's just TOO MANY ways to do things in perl.

i've enjoyed doing a bit of BASH scripting at work lately. just for a challenge. especially doing things that really shouldn't be done in BASH, and making it work anyway.

Java irks me. The idea is great, but IMO it's implemented very poorly. Although I do have to give them credit for the syntax. Syntactically, it's perfect. Just get the JVM optimized, and you'll have me on board.

I need to learn python for work (you're very correct about google liking python...my manager told me to learn python if i wanted to do any programming

jesusphreak

DK...Google doesn't use Python to produce the frontend for its webapps, does it? I assumed Python usage would be for more internal stuff. If they use Python for the frontend, are they using some kind of templating language?

Krak

Im a fan of PHP, just got into Ruby... Lol, I knew Ruby was gonna be a topic when I read the title. I have heard good things about python and bad. Something about whitespace. I stick to PHP (and MySQL) and I dabble in Ruby on Rails. PHP takes a lot of practice. Took me a while to learn it, and I am still a novice I would think. Read a lot of tutorials, they are great. Thats how I learned. Never learn much from books, need more of a hands on. RoR was super easy to pick up and use. Theres just the objects (or whatever you call em) you need to know and you are pretty good to go. And...they are all listed in the API!!! http://api.rubyonrails.com/

jesusphreak

A quick question: is Vanilla written in PHP 5 or not? Also, if I learn OO programming in PHP 5, will I still be able to write extensions for Vanilla or are there some differences I should be aware of?

instagata

I love xhtml & css with a wiff of js I dont like any of the backend programming languages. To much fucking around and tends to bloat out.

jesusphreak

Heh...I don't think you can really call those porgramming languages.

lech

Used to enjoy a good bit of perl hacking, it's still fun from time to time but overall I found it a relative pain in the ass for web stuff. Mainly the fact that many hosts restrict you to the cgi-bin folder and using that as the global directory for perl kind of sucks. Since I've toyed with PHP, while it's good for things I want to do, I still can't for the life of me fully figure out proper class oriented structure without bloating it to the extreme. I guess the KISS method seems to hold true for nearly any application. My strengths are still solid in CSS, so I'm happy for that. Next step is turning XUL inside-out.

Kosmo

Well, I have learned some programming languages in past, or rather TRIED to, languages like C, C++ and some VisualBasic just for kicks. But I'm no programmer, I'm more like a scripter, I like to do things in scripts like Lua, Python, UnrealScript and so on, and ofcourse markups like XHTML and CSS (more like stylesheet language.) It would be really useful to learn LAMP for web development since when you know all your major components then you can kick some major ass. What I want to learn if I had the time would be Ruby on Rails, it sounds neat, and since people are talking about it and I'm pretty confident that it will become the next big thing, the earlier I can get with the program the faster I'll be advancing. But I guess first and foremost I'm a graphic designer and we are known to be bad brogrammers, just like you should never let programmer do your art :D

nathan

I would class js as a programming language. Or a 'scripting language. I feel that css and (x)html are markups and NOT technically a 'programing' language. That said, although those languages are relatively easy to pick up, they are still relatively hard to master. So there are ebnefits of learning those, and only those, especially if you are a designer, and not a develeoper. I know Java. It i very bloated though. I have been doing a little PHP recently (can write apps, but still have troubles writting it fluently). I would love to get in RoR, for simlicity's sake, but for the life of me, I could not inall it on my Mac. That was a few months ago though. Things may have changed.

NickE

My best and favorite language will always be C. It's just so clean, simple and flexible, while keeping variable usage and the like, unlike PHP, unambiguous. One of the few things about PHP that really bothered me was the fact that a variable could be anything anytime, and you never had to declare them. All you have to do is assign it and voila, its a different data type. With C, you declare a variable as a certain data type, and it stays that way throughout the program, and if you try to assign it an incompatible type, the compiler'll give you an error. That, amoung numerous other things (eg. the fact that functions are built in instead of included in libraries), always makes coding in PHP feel like programming with gloves on or something. It's just too high-level with and barely bats an eye at mistakes which could cause a fatal compiler/run-time error in a proper application programming language (eg. access undeclared array elements/variables, overflowing the buffer, etc.). It allows a programming to go blithely on without one single thought to run-time errors, as PHP will take care of it all. Then there's also the fact that optimizations and tricks in C don't often work in PHP, which gets a little annoying sometimes... By the way, (X)HTML/CSS/etc. aren't programming languages. EDIT: And there's no pointers in PHP.

Kosmo

SirNot: One great programmer once said that if PHP was the definitive programming language like C and C++ and it could be used in more than just serverside scripting, programming would revert back to the dos age :D I don't remember what his name was since it was a quick quote in an article, but funny thing was that he was a game programmer :D Don't know the accuracy of that comment, but I guess he knew what he was talking about.

3stripe

Well being a graphic designer the only language I've only ever had a real interest in learning has been actionscript! I guess because it lets you control graphics and sound pretty intuitively... When I was studying I got quite into the whole interactive flash design thing and ended up building quite a few sound manipulation projects etc. Since then I've learnt how to bodge together a bit of PHP and that's it - in the meantime Actionscript 2.0 siddled in without me even noticing :-P

Kosmo

I have read some stuff about the new Actionscript 3 and I'm especially interested about the Flex 2 too, and what is mindblowing is that it is irrelevant what kind of server side languages your server supports, your Flash will work because it is client side program. And if you have an audience who use the latest flash player or can easily pick it up (meaning that they know about 1% of computers which is almost everybody) your program will work flawlessly.

Flash is definedly potentian future application for many things, from simple small applications to site wide systems, maybe even for a full blown CMS (it could happen.)

And for those who praise the easy use of RoR they could like Flex too, it is very neat framework. I demand that you go check out Macromedia Labs!

giginger

I hate all prgramming languages because I don't know them.

I just started the tutorials to lean Max/MSP though so I can create cool audio messing stuff.

3stripe

Kosmo, the lack of an open-source or reasonably priced Flash CMS is really holding back Flash website design I think at the moment... I am dying to see one, or even a Wordpress port that let you manage a Flash website via posts/pages in WP-Admin...

Kosmo

back when Flash 5 came with the PHP support and whatnot, I saw a flash CMS project made by some guys at a game developer named "Slick Willy" (yeah great name.) They were a flash game developers, so their knowledge of Flash was vast. They had some sort of PHP backend with Flash frontend that they edited and updated with the PHP backend. Saw a quick demonstration of it back then, it was a golden time, but the problem then if you remember, was that not that many computers had a) flash player b) for some reason Flash was pretty heavy.

3stripe

Lol at that name. There's a very very poor Flash CMS about called FlashBlocks... also another I had forgotten about at http://cms.beaver82.com/ which is a step up from this, I'm going to check it out again. And another just found: http://www.comatool.com/

ADM

I absolutely LOVE PHP.. I fell in love with it pretty much instantly and it's definitely has come in handy.. though I would like to get into Javascript abit more. After what I've seen it do (gmail) I really would like to muck around with it abit more. Oh and I would also like to get into Flash actionscripting abit more (which if I remember correctly is actually alot similar to Javascript (if I'm wrong please correct me :p)), I will be picking up a copy of Flash myself in the next couple of weeks so I'll definitely make sure I get the most of it (It's getting paid for me for an upcoming website design I have to do).

Kosmo

JS and Actionscript both are based on script called ECMAscript.

ADM

Ahh right, thought they were similar. I'll have to look into that ECMAscript, just for knowledge/research sake ;)