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Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#51

Post by px1999 »

SilliMon wrote: post #49

I find it interesting that no one has suggested any Microsoft tools, .NET or C# I guess these are all dead now?

No, this is HN, they're not supposed to get any love here.

I'd suggest .NET/C# myself. It doesn't have the new flavour of the month feel, but there are some interesting things happening, and it's a solid platform with a bunch of serious, good choices for developing websites and applications. Also, nice documentation and an excellent toolchain. The downside of course is cost...

That said, language/environment etc all should come down to what the OP is trying to achieve - there are a lot of things that there are better alternatives for, but for general purpose webstuff, it's usually a solid choice...

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#52

Post by kazagistar »

pwang wrote: post #23

Since 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…

If you wanna move towards what the future of mathematical computing looks like though, you should probably look at Julia. It has one thing other high level dynamic languages like Python cannot hope to touch: incredible performance without having to resort to C.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#54

Post by krob »

What world do you want to chain yourself to for the next several years? Do you have any immediate requirements to be on the MS platform? is linux or unix fine?

Do your requirements concern high concurrency?

Do your requirements concern science?

You are an engineer and there are some specific things that may come in handy for your type of work. Python has some major libraries for use in the scientific community as well as statistical analysis libraries to do similar tasks to Matlab / R for building graphs and such.

You talk about using CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla. These are all PHP-based CMSs which dynamically read data from a SQL database. Do you want to continue working with similar code? Or do you want to jump into the world of a new language?

Microsoft (C#.NET MVC2) Linux/Unix (Python(django, pylons), ruby(Ruby on Rails), PHP(Symfony2, Zend2, Laravel, list goes on), Perl(Mojolicious, Catalyst, etc not sure the rest), Java(GWT, Wicket, Play, Grails), you could literally roll a dice and figure out what you want to follow.

If you want to go for trendy, in order of trendy: Ruby, Python, Java, go-lang, Closure, PHP

All these languages are generally accepted as general purpose except for PHP.

As the PHP community matures more however, this is changing, especially for deployment tools, general cli scripts to accomplish tasks which often times in the past would be a bash/shell script.

What ever you do, before you make your decision, I think the best determining factor is ask your own colleagues what they are learning and follow suite, especially if it's within one of these listed languages. This will help you if you run into problems since you will already have an established support network of friends for help.

Hope that's useful.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#55

Post by bachback »

adrianm wrote: post #6

I'll throw my hat in here for learning Clojure. It's a modern Lisp that runs on the JVM, with a great community and awesome libraries. (For example, https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse ) As others have mentioned, it all comes down to what you really want to do. I use Clojure both professionally (for web development, statistical computing/analytics software, natural language processing) and for fun on a daily basi…

The people who will admire LISP skills are a very elect group of people even among "programmers". Getting stuff done in Clojure takes a lot of effort at first and finding help is much more difficult. There are ~5000 questions on SO, and 150'000 on Rails. In general there are quite a few downsides to Lisp, which Paul Graham likes to overlook. I'm very impressed with Lighttable which is build in Clojurescript. What libs do you use? I find it difficult to get started. It is my impression that you have to invest a lot of time to build things you don't to be building.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#56

Post by ivoras »

adrianm wrote: post #6

I'll throw my hat in here for learning Clojure. It's a modern Lisp that runs on the JVM, with a great community and awesome libraries. (For example, https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse ) As others have mentioned, it all comes down to what you really want to do. I use Clojure both professionally (for web development, statistical computing/analytics software, natural language processing) and for fun on a daily basi…

For a JVM language it appears to be remarkably slow (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/clojure.php), especially compared to Scala (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/scala.php).

(OTOH Python is still the slowest language around... http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...).

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#57

Post by pestaa »

kodablah wrote: post #29
adrianm wrote: post #6

I'll throw my hat in here for learning Clojure. It's a modern Lisp that runs on the JVM, with a great community and awesome libraries. (For example, https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse ) As others have mentioned, it all comes down to what you really want to do. I use Clojure both professionally (for web development, statistical computing/analytics software, natural language processing) and for fun on a daily basi…

I have similar feelings about Scala. Combines functional programming w/ a strong/static type system and all the benefits of the JVM. Very practical and fun which I found was not the case w/ Haskell and ML languages. And you couldn't ask for better timing, first day of class starts tomorrow[1]! (and in a month and a half, reactive programming[2]) 1 - https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun 2 - https://www.coursera.org…

Can you please tell me more about your experience with Haskell?

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#58

Post by taylodl »

random_coder wrote: post #40
dizzystar wrote: post #39

Earlier 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 koans are a good place to start - https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#59

Post by stevoo »

Hi,

I have read a lot of good comments here. You might be hard to find the solution that you want from this answers as there is no solution in what is the best technology now. A lot will argue, but it wont matter.

You dont require the greatest and mightiest in making a CMS. What you need to learn how to actual code. Since we do assume that you do not have the greatest experience in programming, i believe that you greatest strength currently is in numbers.

That is why i believe that PHP is the language to go. It might have some quirks and stuff. People might hate it. But it gets the work done for what you require. It has been out for ever. There is a lot of support. You can easily find question for everything. There are some great frameworks out there, but i believe you should keep away from them.

If you pick up PHP, then it is pretty easy to move to Java later on. But that is another chapter.

So core PHP as it is extremely easy to set up in a LAMP stack. i do home you are using that. If you dont want to learn CSS and stuff, use bootstrap to get it out of the way. But i recommend trying to write a css on your own so you can learn the basic stuff. When you are more comfortable with CSS throw that out and use bootstrap. Then build you PHP CMS from scratch. Split Everything out, seperate classes for queries, functions, html. Look into caching, performance etc.

But most important of all. Have fun doing it.

Hit me up if you want some help/guides/start anything. In my profile.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

#60

Post by puredanger »

random_coder wrote: post #40
dizzystar wrote: post #39

Earlier 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 think this has a great set of links: http://www.quora.com/Clojure/What-are-the-best-resources-for...
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