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Re: [PLUG] OT: The place to be?
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On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 06:50:53PM -0400, Floyd Johnson wrote:
> Having been asleep through the rise of Perl and Java, too occupied at
> the time to practice on Python before it got trendy, and having only
> recently heard of Ruby, I wanna know:
>
> What programming and/or sysadminning weaponry under development today is
> going to be in demand in the next 18 months, and where can I download
> the compiler/interpreter?
In demand? That's going to continue to be Perl/Java/VB/C#/COBOL, etc.
What you want to be using? That would probably be either Ruby or Python.
Ruby is closer to Perl, if you know any of that, and has a much friendlier
user community. Plus, its just a better language (guess which one I use
;-) Both languages, however, are becoming very popular lately; Ruby
because of the Rails web application framework and Python because, um...
uh... because Google uses it? I don't know.
+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| Language | URL |
+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| Ruby | http://www.ruby-lang.org/ |
| Python | http://www.python.org/ |
+----------+--------------------------------------------+
I'm biased, yes, but personally I would say "learn Ruby". Ruby's getting
very popular (perhaps too popular) these days and there will be more and
more Rails jobs in the next 18 months popping up. As well, doing
sysadmin-style scripting in Ruby is even nicer than it was in Perl, so
there's that, too. As well, there is only one framework to learn for Web
development (there is more than one for Ruby, but Rails is the 800-lb
gorilla of Ruby web frameworks), whereas there are two Rails-wannabes for
Python (Django and TurboGears) and a third, darkhorse library/file called
web.py from one of the founders of Reddit.com. Despite all those crusty
Perl guys yelling at me "TMTOWTDI!", this will lower your mnemonic load
in that you can just get started with Rails without having to weigh the
pros and cons of multiple, very similar frameworks.
One caveat: Ruby's garbage collection is somewhat immature, and as a
platform, is slightly slower than Python. This matters not at all for
sysadmin types of tasks and can easily be mitigated for Web app
programming, but I would recommend against trying to do a more
complicated app in pure Ruby at this time because of this issue. It _will_
bite you if you try.
If you're interested in going a little farther afield, you might try one
or more of the following languages:
+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| Language | URL (*) |
+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| Erlang | http://www.erlang.org/ |
| OCaml | http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/ |
| Haskell | http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell |
+----------+--------------------------------------------+
* All of these are functional languages, just so you know what you're
getting into. But, they are all "fast" and are thus not immediately
shunned.
These are the currently "interesting" languages, as per the susurrus of
the Interwebs these days.
--
Toby DiPasquale
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