Thanks for the suggestions everyone! My goal is to be able to build at least the initial prototypes for complex web / mobile applications, so that I can test out some of our ideas. I did this in the past with various content management systems, but I feel that they are sometimes not flexible enough and come with a lot of general purpose features that are not necessary for my application. Currently I am trying to build an education website for children with illustrated books, repetitive exercises etc., that's very easy to navigate and can keep track of progress of each student, encourage them to learn more etc.
Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
My weapon of choice is Clojure and I don't really agree with this post. There is a serious lack of tutorials and guides to get basic things going, the documentation is all-around horrible, and in general, Clojure is a very difficult language to get started with, though it certainly has improved immensely over the past year and it is rewarding once you get past the initial humps and start to really grok it. Clojure is…
How do you suggest that one should get past the initial hardships in learning clojure, assuming one is willing to put the needed effort? I've always wanted to learn a lisp and clojure seemed good, but couldn't find a good tutorial for lisp beginners.
The "Clojure Programming"[1] book is good. Also "The Joy of Clojure"[2], to ease you into the philosophy/mindset of Clojure.
There's also http://www.braveclojure.com which is still a work in progress but it's good for diving in.
[1]: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920013754.do [2]: http://joyofclojure.com
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#43Since you know Matlab and C, I would suggest Python as being a good choice. It's much faster to develop web-oriented things in than C or Perl, and if you ever want to do more computationally intensive things, many people find NumPy and SciPy to be fantastic alternatives to Matlab. The nice thing about Python is that you can find so many things all in one language: shell scripting; graphical UIs; web programming and w…
Perl isn't a flavor of the moment language, and can do everything you say, plus sees a lot of use in bioinformatics and linguistics. It's a mature language that predates python. As for a lot of good libraries, Python's PyPI has 34665 packages to CPAN's 124,546 modules. And it's community is well known for it's helpfulness and humility, perhaps because of the character of it's creator.
Most modern dynamic programming languages owe a debt to Perl, and the modern web certainly does. It has a variety of modern frameworks: Catalyst Dancer Mason Maypole Mojolicious Cyclone 3
I'd say Catalyst and Mojolicious are the one's I've heard about most.
Perl may not be considered as cool as Python by some, and there are reasons you can criticize it, but it's not any of the reasons you gave.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
My weapon of choice is Clojure and I don't really agree with this post. There is a serious lack of tutorials and guides to get basic things going, the documentation is all-around horrible, and in general, Clojure is a very difficult language to get started with, though it certainly has improved immensely over the past year and it is rewarding once you get past the initial humps and start to really grok it. Clojure is…
How do you suggest that one should get past the initial hardships in learning clojure, assuming one is willing to put the needed effort? I've always wanted to learn a lisp and clojure seemed good, but couldn't find a good tutorial for lisp beginners.
I wish I had an answer, but I wasn't a Lisp beginner when I started with Clojure.
I'd definitely suggest using Linux, installing Clojure + Leiningen2, and getting familiar with the REPL. Also, getting Clojure Programming by Chad Emerick, et.al, is a solid first step to at least getting some things started.
Learning Clojure is like any other language: if you want to really dive in, you have to think of a project to get started in and take it step-by-step. I have not written algorithms or done scripting with Clojure, so I don't know how that stuff would work out. I feel there are better languages for that kind of stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#45Languages are by far not the most important thing. My recommendation to you would be to go with ruby, despite the fact that I'm not a ruby programmer.
Ruby borrows lots of syntax from perl so you'll feel at home. It's obviously a first-class citizen on the web these days (RoR much?), and the ruby community has a perl-like focus on getting sh*t done + testing.
(Disclaimer, my weapons of choice are python and go. go because it's not often internet giants of that caliber get together an invent a language, the last one turned out to have a pretty long shelf life. Python because it's simple, clean, and lots of other non-specific adjectives. Actually I think I came to python because I wanted a free matlab and stayed for the KoolAid).
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#46I'll throw in my hat for PHP. There will be many people who will tell you to avoid PHP and I would have agreed if it wasn't for the Laravel framework. Laravel 4 is really amazing, it carries the simplicity and power of Ruby on Rails over to the PHP world. As a framework it covers most of your typical newbie problems out of the box (e.g. plugging security holes and organising your code) and you'll end up doing things…
I would like to second this. Laravel is all the lessons learned from a decade of frameworks, code igniter, kohana, and others.
Its the cutting edge framework. Plus, PHP is the most widely supported scripting language on the planet. Its the default scripting language for any host to support.
Also, combine it with Bootstrap and Jquery, You'll have amazing job opportunities and will be able to make amazing things.
Caveat, learning web dev is a godforsaken nightmare until you know it, then you feel the POWAH.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#47Lol. Hope all these comments help...
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
My weapon of choice is Clojure and I don't really agree with this post. There is a serious lack of tutorials and guides to get basic things going, the documentation is all-around horrible, and in general, Clojure is a very difficult language to get started with, though it certainly has improved immensely over the past year and it is rewarding once you get past the initial humps and start to really grok it. Clojure is…
How do you suggest that one should get past the initial hardships in learning clojure, assuming one is willing to put the needed effort? I've always wanted to learn a lisp and clojure seemed good, but couldn't find a good tutorial for lisp beginners.
The only advice that has helped me learn Clojure was: do not travel the road alone. Coming from a strong OO background, getting started posts/videos, REPL tutorials, and books only helped me to the point of reading and running Clojure. I agree with dizzystar that the documentation needs serious work, because I find myself reading the source for insight into how I should use things, or structure codebases. I think highly of Clojure, but don't expect it to be easy. Keep tabs with http://clojure.org/cheatsheet and http://clojuredocs.org open at all times, a REPL available at all times, and either use emacs/*nix or accept being in the suburbs.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#49I find it interesting that no one has suggested any Microsoft tools, .NET or C#
I guess these are all dead now?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?
#50If it was up to me I would tell you to learn Python+Django but since you're familiar with Drupal and Joomla I would recommend you learn PHP, Wordpress and Laravel.
PHP is very high in demand no matter what anyone tells you. You will forever be fixing legacy code or even building your own from scratch PHP is everywhere.