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Closed 11 years ago.
I have graduated from my university almost a year ago. Since then I have worked with many different technologies, such as PHP, JQuery, ASP.NET, C# etc. Recently I have switched to a company where powerbuilder is being used for development.
The problem is that I haven't mastered any of the above languages. I can do stuff with those but when it comes to the complex tasks I often struggle with it because I don't have enough deep knowledge about it. After looking at powerbuilder for a few days I sense that this is going to happen again because most of the application code have been done using some sort of library which requires some advanced level of skill on powerbuilder.
My question is, is it OK for me to work on different technologies without mastering a single one of them?
If you choose to specialise the you are taking an opportunity cost by making yourself unavailable for other types of work. This is good if you can be confident that your chosen specialisation will last for a reasonable length of time. However, you can guarantee (along with death and taxes) that software will change. You will always be required to learn some new framework or approach in order to remain current.
So to avoid finding yourself at an intellectual dead end (are transputers still in use anywhere?) you should adopt a doctrine of constant learning. Learning is usually fun and almost always leads to a joy of discovery of some new tool or design. And never keep this knowledge to yourself (it only has a half-life of 18 months anyway). Share what you have learned with others.
So to answer your question: don't specialise.
According to the Pragmatic Programmer book, one of the tips for a good programmer is:
Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
Make learning a habit.
This means that you constantly have to use, or learn about, new technologies. While becoming a master in one particular technology may be rewarding, technologies come and go, today more quickly than ever. A mastery in one particular programming language, tool or API may make you a guru today, but may mean nothing tomorrow.
IIRC they also recommended developers to master several technologies, but remain versed in many - at least in the sense of having heard about them, played around with them, being able to engage in a conversation about them.
So, I would say yes - specialization is necessary, but this doesn't mean one should ignore domains outside his own.
There is no 'right answer' to this question other than maybe, 'it depends'.
You will find it easier to find better jobs if you specialise, as you call it. I would think of it more as working with a specific language/framework. Further, it is important to solve difficult problems and gain experience, irrespective of the language chosen.
Once you've accepted the above as a truism and specialised, then I would suggest that you branch out and learn new languages. Fortunately, languages become easier to learn when you have more experience.
However, more than anything, you have to look at keeping yourself interested over a long period of time. That is the real key. If you have interest, you will continue learn and gain experience. Maybe that will mean you do something that is not particularly relevant to most jobs, such as writing a language compiler. Or maybe you will find that the rush of working for big clients on big projects is more important than a specific language/framework.
So that's it - just keep interested, and keep learning. And, where possible, build focus in the thing that interests you, as that will make it easier for you to find employment going forward.
It is important to be specialized in at least one programming language/platform, especially early on in your career. By specialized i mean reading a book about it, cover to cover, and having extensive hands on experience developing for it, at work or participating in an open source project.
The idea behind this is that when you specialize in a language, you will learn many concepts that you can carry over to different languages/platforms. e.g: The master of a language can master another with relative ease.
Further on in you career being exposed to many platforms is a good thing, as you start to shift from begin a developer to a developer/architect, and you need to make decisions about which platform to use, the pros and cons of each platform and so no.
So my advice is try to master at least one language, along with its tools and frameworks. After that you can move on to different platforms. It is important to use the right platform for the current project, you will need to determine that case by case, with the assistance of a senior developer.
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Closed 10 years ago.
How often is language the deciding factor for selecting a job?
Many of us here are well versed in many languages, C++, Java, C#, and likely have many other languages under our belt for the right occassion (really any occasion is the right occasion for Python, AMIRITE?), so this isn't so much a question of choosing a job that is a good fit based on your skill set. Rather, if you are skilled with most languages, do you pick your favorite, or do you follow the money (given the tight economy).
I'm considering coming out of retirement, and have started to look around and what's available.
Over the years, I've moved towards C# and Python; many jobs in the area are looking for .NET developers, but there are plenty of them that do not. I cut my teef on C++, consider myself adept at the language, and know my way around a Java. But I find myself really digging what they're doing to C#, and I have always loved python.
Even if the work will be interesting, how important is the language to you?
I think that although in its essence programming is bigger than any language(languages are just the means, not the goals) everyone has a preference toward some languages. However, it often turns out that our preferences are towards languages not considered mainstream.
I live and work in Bulgaria(a country known from the movies as the center of crime in Europe, though that's not the case). Here 90% of the job ads are for PHP, Java and C# developers... There is also C for embedded development(which I hate), C++ (for maintenance of older systems - no one starts new projects in C++ anymore) and Cobol :-) I'd very much like to make money developing in Clojure or Ruby for instance, but the reality is that there is simply no demand around here. Of the three options I've found Java to appeal most to me - it's a nice language, with a nice community around it and a great VM behind it. So I naturally consider Java ads first, but I'm always open to any challenges as long as find them intriguing...
I would think that one would have a bias towards not just the language they want to develop in, but in the environment and type of applications they are likely to be working with. I think that would be the deciding factor?
Java - Coffee grinder
Python - Snake charmer
C - Optician
C# - Laser eye surgeon
C++ - Night vision goggle manufacturer
Ruby - Jeweller
.NET - Fisherman
the language itself doesnot matter so much, as the technology used does.
for example, a php/mySQL developer could easier convert to ASP.NET/MSSQL, than a .NET Windows Forms programmer will. I was both and felt more support from my php/mysql skills than my desktop C# programming ones.
But when the working process is annoying to you (e.g. you don't even want to go back to C++ coz it was hell for you), you better go find .NET desktop jobs - you will find that 90% of work done in the past by you in C++ was abstracted in .NET libraries and you'll get more fun from programming (though some people love that so-called 'c++ hell' for hacking).
as Chuck Jazdzewski fatherly said, (at the end of http://www.removingalldoubt.com/PermaLink.aspx/a32977e2-cb7d-42ea-9d25-5e539423affd ) , programming is fun, but shipping is your job. Joel Spolsky (www.joelonsoftware.com) has also nice entries about that.
Consider this when you are looking for a new working environment.
I've chosen Java. I know many more, but I think its the best decision to stick with one. If you work one year Java, one year c#, one year python you will not get a job as Java programmer that should have at least 3 years of experience.
For a coder, who's profession is based on it, is should be the main deciding factor. (...with Money a very close second!)
This may sound shallow but I tend to stick with the one I know best. Having spent several years in C# and .NET I wouldn't go back to PHP or Java, not because they are bad but rather I don't want to have to re-learn everything again... it would be sort of like starting all over again.
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Closed 11 years ago.
Question 1: How exactly do modern computer language come into being and why? How do they get their start and who is behind them?
Question 2: If any, what languages currently in their infancy are showing promise?
How exactly do modern computer language come into being and why? How do they get their start and who is behind them?
It's a multistage process:
Pointy-headed type theorists and other professionals are continually proposing new language features. You can read about them in places like the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), which has been held annually since 1973.
Many of these proposals are actually implemented in some research language; some research languages I personally find promising include Coq and Agda. Haskell is a former research language that made it big. A research language that gets 10 users is often considered a success by its designers. Many research languages never get that far.
From research to deployment I know of two models:
Model A: A talented amateur comes along and synthesizes a whole bunch of existing features, maybe including some new ideas, into a new language. The amateur has talent, charisma, and maybe a killer app. Thus C, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl are born.
Model P: A talented professional make career sacrifices in order to build and promulgate a new language. The professional has talent, a deep knowledge of the field, and maybe a killer app. Thus Haskell, Lua, ML, Pascal, Scala, and Scheme are born.
My definition of a professional is someone who is paid to know about programming languages, to pass on that knowledge, and to develop new knowledge in programming languages. Unfortunately this is not the same as designing and implementing new languages, and it is not the same as making implementations that many people can use. This is why most successful programming languages are designed and built by amateurs, not professionals.
There have been quite a few interesting research languages that have had hundreds or even thousands of users but yet never quite made it big. Of these one of my favorites is probably Icon. I have argued elsewhere that nobody really knows why languages become popular.
Summary: Languages come into being because people want to make programming better, and they have new ideas. Languages get their start when somebody takes a whole bunch of ideas, some new and some proven, and synthesizes them into a coherent whole. It's a big job. The person behind a new language might be a programming-language professional, but historically, most languages that become widely used seem to have been created by talented amateurs.
Answer 2: Fortran 2008 looks very promising.
Come on, bring on the downvotes you humourless Java-teenies, Pythonettes, Rubes and Haskellites !
1) Most development environments these days are built to abstract a lot of low-level/inner workings of an platform to speed up development and cater for new user-interfaces and plaform technologies. There are a both open-source projects and corporates behind these changes... For instance an example would be jQuery is a newish Library that just wraps a lot of javascript making things easier and cross-platform...
Bjarne Stroustrup wrote a book on the history of C++, called "The Design and Evolution of C++".
The genesis of a programming language is always a different story. I'm currently reading "Masterming of programming", which is a series of interview with authors of popular languages. They explain what problems they tackled and how the language was born -- a really cool book.
The TIOBE index can give somehow a trend amongst the programming languages, including the emerging ones. I bet that the future lies in language that will run on top of the JVM or CLR (Notably due to the effort invested in the VMs which are now really great). Concurrency seems to be one of the hot problem of today; so I guess we will see some interesting moves in this area (e.g. Clojure).
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Closed 9 years ago.
I already have a few languages under my belt (in a rough order of expertise): Python, C, C++, PHP, Javascript, Haskell, Java, MIPS, x86 assembler. But it's been almost 2 years since I learned a new one, and I'm starting to get the itch. I have a few criteria:
Must (repeat: must) have a free Linux implementation
Should be different from the languages I already know. In other words, it should have features that get me thinking about solving problems in a new way.
Should have some potential for practical use. It doesn't need to be the next Java, but this rules out Brainf* and Shakespeare :) I don't really care how many job postings does it have, but real-world apps and libraries are a plus.
Should have at least just enough free learning materials to get me started in it.
I was thinking Lisp (CL? something else?) or OCaml. I already have some experience with functional languages with Haskell (yes I know that Lisp/OCaml are multi-paradigm). I'm not an expert - e.g. parts of code from Real World Haskell can still contort my brain, but I understand the basic concepts and some advanced ones (functors, monads).
Which one to choose? Any other languages that I have overlooked? Also, could you please include some useful links to good books/tutorials etc.
Neither Lisp nor OCaml is super far afield from what you already know. Here are four suggestions chosen partly for intrinsic interest and partly to stretch your horizons.
A logic programming language, probably Prolog. I haven't found good materials online, but the book The Art of Prolog by Sterling and Shapiro is excellent. The more basic textbook by Clocksin and Mellish is also good. The main point of interest is programming with relations, not functions.
A pure object-oriented language, either
Smalltalk or Self. If you've only used hybrid object-oriented languages you'll be amazed how beautiful pure object-orientation can be. I've linked to the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk. I personally would recommend learning Smalltalk before tackling Self; there's a very large and active community and the software is well developed. Self stands on Smalltalk's shoulders and is an even more inspiring design, but the community is much smaller. For those who have access to the ACM Digital library I recommend the excellent talk by Dave Ungar at HOPL-III; the paper is also pretty good.
The Icon programming language has two great things going for it; a powerful and unusual evaluation model with implicit backtracking, and a user-extensible model of string processing that beats regular expressions all hollow. I'm sorry to say that Icon has never quite kept pace with the times, and of all my recommendations it is the least practical. In fact I fear the language is moribund. But it will stretch your mind almost as much as Haskell, and in wildly different directions. Icon is still very useful for string-processing tasks of modest size.
You can read about Icon string processing in an article by Ralph Griswold from Computer Journal.
The Lua programming language is my last and least radical suggestion. Its interest is not so much in novel language features or paradigms but in the superb engineering of the language and its implementation. Lua occupies a number of niches, including scripting, gaming, string processing, and lightweight functional programming. But its main point of interest is its seamless integration with C, and to get the full benefit, you should bind a C library into Lua.
The HOPL-III web site also contains an excellent talk and paper about Lua.
Both Common Lisp and Ocaml are certainly useful to learn. If you already know Haskell, CL might be the more different experience.
SBCL and Clozure CL are both very useful implementations of Common Lisp on Linux. (Overview about various implementations: Common Lisp survey.)
As a starting point I would recommend to use Peter Seibel's excellent book Practical Common Lisp, that is both available online and printed.
Community pointers are here: CLIKI.
Prolog may be what you are looking for.
Edit
The first commenter is right, my answer was pretty short and not very useful, so:
My preferred implementation is SWI-Prolog. I personally learned from Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence. It's style is pretty clear and it contains many examples, but I don't own any other book on logic programming (it's a shame, really :) so I have no basis for comparison.
Erlang is pretty interesting to learn because of its super efficient concurrency model, and the ease with which you can write distributed systems (for an example of this, CouchDB was written in Erlang). It's a dynamically typed functional language, but you can also write code in a procedural fashion. The tutorial I learned it with is called "Getting Started with Erlang", which covers just about every part of the language.
If you want to make use of your Java and functional programming knowledge, and you want to learn a Lisp, then try Clojure.
The implementation is free and cross-platform including Linux, because it runs on the JVM. Being a Lisp, it's different enough (in useful and wonderful ways) from most other languages to make things interesting. Some features such as immutable data structures, multimethods, metadata support, focus on safe concurrency, etc. are fairly novel compared to the languages you listed. Clojure is geared heavily toward being a practical and useful language rather than an academic one. It's a functional language but not "pure", which is arguably a good thing. You can also trivially make use of any Java library from within Clojure.
Clojure is a new language, so the only book out so far is Programming Clojure, but it's a pretty good one. There's also a wiki which may not be entirely up-to-date, because the language is still evolving very quickly. The mailing list and IRC channel are very friendly, welcoming places to ask questions. The official website is also a good resource, of course.
I'm going to recommend something that I haven't yet tried, but plan to, so you have to judge for yourself this one. There's this language, called IO, which is particular in that its prototype-based, like JavaScript, but also borrows concepts from many other languages. Its job market it's probably nonexistent, but I thought I mention this language.
Otherwise, a language from the Lisp family may be pretty different from what you already know. In that regard I'd recommend Scheme, which is, in my opinion, more elegant than Common Lisp. The new concept that you might found interesting in Scheme is continuations.
If you take the Scheme path, make some time to watch these videos from 1986. They're amazing.
Have a look at Smalltalk ! Either Cincom VWST or Smalltalk/X - dont bother with Squeak as the interface is terrible). VAST is good also but really only Windows centric. And dont bother about the sceptics that pore scorn on Smalltalk -- they arent using it and are stuck in the morass of edit-run-debug cycle languages and multiple dispirt linked libraries. :-)
Why these Smalltalks - well, they come complete wth excellent IDE, GUI tools builtin, best debugger you will ever see, online help, and is totally independent of the underlying OS. Eg a ST/X programming running under Linux can be transfered ( source code) to Windows ST/X and it should execute.
ST/X is free with only a very minor licience restrictions, Cincom offer a free NC ( Not Commercial ) version that is NOT restricted. I use ST/X as I prefer the default look & feel
it offers. Their IDE interfaces are very similar.
Languages without a IDE & GUI tools are just wasting your time as the world is really GUI, no matter how terrific the underlying language is. Eg Ruby is great, but with no IDE or easy GUI tools its really frustrating.
Smalltalk is not easy to get into, and its not perfect,(what language is?) but very satisfying to learn & use. And now that the hardware and operating systems have finally caught up with Smalltalks needs . very efficient.
I second Rainer's Common Lisp recommendation.
CL has all the things you're looking for and will provide a genuinely novel experience that will also make your coding efforts and approaches in other languages better.
But bring patience and persistence, you will have to grasp a lot of concepts that will seem alien at first.
You could try Tcl. It was sufficiently different to provoke an adverse reaction in my brain, so I can't really tell you how I found it different, but there's been a lot of good stuff written in it (maybe less nowadays than earlier).
C# has a free implementation in Linux under the Mono project, and it arguably is a very marketable skill unless you're completely anti-Microsoft.
My favorite C# book is Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, Fourth Edition.
If you're really want exotic, F# is an OCaml style language that runs on the .NET platform and mono, and is getting a lot of attention these days.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/fsharp/default.aspx
Books for F#:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=f%23
Of the suggestions I've seen so far, I like Lisp (see Secko) and Smalltalk (see brett), as both will give you another view of languages. Prolog even more so.
Another language that is different is Erlang -- I haven't had a chance to learn it yet, but it handles concurrency in a different way. The best link I can give you is the main website.
In terms of recommendations, Lisp is good both because it is currently used and because it is very old. The others you will have to look at sources and see which one appeals the most.
Try FORTRAN, then? I hear it's still actively used by the scientific and mathemematical communities, plus it should be dissimilar enough to be a learning challenge.
Compilers:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries
http://www.g95.org/
http://www.fortran.com/compilers.html
http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/fortran.shtml
IDEs:
http://www.eclipse.org/photran/
http://force.lepsch.com/ (FORTRAN 77 only)
Tutorials:
Introduction to Modern FORTRAN: http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/courses/Fortran/
FORTRAN 90 Tutorial: http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs201/NOTES/fortran.html
You could also learn Visual Basic.NET, in case you ever get forced to maintain that. Evidently mono has a working Linux implementation of it:
http://www.mono-project.com/Visual_Basic
Factor is pretty radically different from everything you said you know, and also everything else listed. It's stack-based, like Forth, but has a fairly comprehensive library and a lot of interesting features.
Ada is very practical -- there's a compiler based on gcc -- but also quite different from the other imperative languages you know. I find the type system a bit stifling, but it was worth learning something about.
Lisp is a great HLL, it has everything that other languages lack. In my opinion, this is a very good language that can "satisfy" any programmers needs.
Perl is also a HLL like Lisp, it's interesting and fun at the same time. It derives from C so you can pick it up as you go. It can be hard sometimes and some people tend to get lost while learning, but it's worth knowing.
Both languages are free of use and come with Linux.
Links
Lisp:
If Lisp is so great,
An Introduction and Tutorial for Common Lisp
Perl:
PERL -- Practical Extraction and Report Language
Books
On Lisp - Great book by Paul Graham on the Lisp language. It's free and you can download it here.
Scala has been very good for making me see programming in a new light. I haven't used it for anything worklike yet, but it's still affected how I write code in other languages - not just Java, but PHP. I recently wrote a simple parser for a WordPress plugin, and the code is vastly more functional and immutable than it would have been six months ago, and better for it, despite the lack of enforcement in PHP.
The only other language to have affected the way I work so dramatically is Perl, nearly a decade earlier. Perl has contributed a lot to the way I pseudo-code, even if I never touch the language itself.
Many people compare the functional aspects of Scala to Haskell. You may even imagine that knowing Haskell means you already know all Scala could teach you, but I don't believe that. The way Scala combines OO and function has a way of making it seem like that's actually the truest form of both of them.
Like you, I have over a dozen languages under my belt. While shopping for something to play with for writing a cross-compiler, I ran across ML and family. Many very good ideas there, and they have taught me to write code is a much different way; for example, my JavaScript now has a decidedly functional bent.
After toying with OCaml under Windows a while (and getting frustrated with stability issues), I ran across F#, an offspring of OCaml. The two are quite similar (can cross-compile a lot of code), but OCaml apparently has a really good macro system (P4) and type-classes (in support of writing "strongly typed" operators against generic types), while F# has excellent support for asynchronous and parallel operations, monads, units-of-measure for numeric types, as well as cleaner OO syntax and awesome IDE integration (VS2008 & will be released in-the-box with VS2010). I much prefer F# these days, since I have access to the whole .NET runtime and loads of 3rd party libraries. In fact, I write most of my one-off and utility code in F# now; for me, its generally much more productive than C++, JavaScript, C#, PowerShell, or anything else.
F# works fairly well under Mono on Linux, and has a good following there. The compiler and runtime will be open sourced once stable (released with VS2010), and the developers consider Mono support enough of a priority for it to be seriously considered for non-Microsoft use.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Okay, so far, I have been taking computer science courses in my high school and doing some of my own research on the web, and I have found I really like the subject. However, the computer science courses, having given me a small amount of experience in a few languages (C++, java, and python), leave me wondering where to go for development on my own.
I would like to create desktop applications, or even web applications if I could wrap my head around it. What language would you think would best facilitate this?
As a side-note, what are some good books or online documents that explain general computer science topics? I have found some good ones, but they haven't given me the depth I really want.What are some good ones?
Find an "itch"--a program you wish existed, that would be useful for you to have, but you can't find (or costs money). Then try writing it, using online resources (like Stack Overflow) to help you.
At this stage in your career, language doesn't matter very much. Some languages are better than others at certain tasks, but often your own level of comfort with the language outweighs other issues. So just pick a language you're interested in, and a project you're interested in, and get to work.
You may find that you need to start with a simpler project, or you may find more resources for a different language or framework. But getting started with something--no matter what that something is--is probably the most important thing.
Here is a classic but still quite relevant book if you ever want to level up from coder to software engineer.
Since you're still in high school, I would tell you that time is on your side. You have plenty of time to develop as a computer scientist. Therefore, take the long view for your development. So it's much better for you to understand the abstractions that underly software technology.
In my humble opinion, C++ and Java will always be around and you have plenty of time to develop your skills in that arena. However, a higher level language like Scheme or Python will pay plenty of dividends. You might find this recommendation highly enlightening.
In addition, every application will deal with a database as its system of record. Understanding SQL and data modeling is a win-win.
Also, understanding formal logic and/or discrete mathematics is indispensable for computer science. Computer languages are nothing but formal languages for executing
procedures: i.e. mathematical induction is used to define their syntax and semantics.
It sounds like you would enjoy jumping into a high level, modern language that's native to the operating system you want to target; Objective-C or C# for example. On the other hand if you really want to do something for the web, building a web app isn't much harder (there are just more choices to pick from for the back end and front end technologies you decide to use).
Basically, decide what project you want to work on and choose the best language for it. What really matters is that you're working on something.
What language to further develop in?
Given that you know C++, Java, and Python already, a next language I might suggest would be SQL and DDL: defining databases, and getting data in and out of them.
If your CS course didn't touch on it, I highly advise spending a bit of time with a more functional style of language like erlang, haskell or even lisp.
They won't become your day-to-day hacking language overnight, but can really help you grasp important programming concepts relavent accross all languages.
....especially the one about choosing the right language for the task at hand.