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Re: [PLUG] OT: The place to be?
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On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 06:35:54PM -0400, Toby DiPasquale wrote:
> 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?
One of the best ways to start a flame war is to ask "What's the best
language?" Close behind that is "What's the best editor?" Same for
distribution, windowing environment, etc., etc. The truth is that
you should just try them out and see what fits. Because most of the
*good* choices are free/libre open source software (FLOSS), you can
try them out free of charge and constrictive end user license.
That said, as a user of the one true and only best language, I'll
contest one point Toby made.
> 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.
Python has a very friendly user community at tutor@python.org [1].
It's a mailing list for people learning the language, and I
consistently get great advice.
Python.org, which Toby pointed you toward, has a great page on
"getting started" [2], where you'll find links to a bunch of tutorials
on the web as well as books in print (books are surprisingly useful
for learning to program).
Yesterday FLOSS Weekly posted an interview with Guido van Rossum, the
creator of Python [3]. It's a great discussion of programming
languages in general. Earlier interviews FLOSS weekly has done are
also quite good.
Happy hacking,
gabe
[1] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
[2] http://www.python.org/about/gettingstarted/
[3] http://www.twit.tv/floss11
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