Whatever his friends, you, or other go-to mentor use.
Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#42Depends on what you want to do. Each language has an advantage in its own domain.
If you want to build for the web then I would recommend learning Javascript. You really can't avoid Javascript on the web so it is a good thing to learn it well. You can even learn Node in order to make it easier to set up a backend for your web app. The quickest way to get started with the web these days is to learn Javascript and use it with a Node server on the backend. There is a lot of noise in the Javascript community with tools such as React, Angular, Webpack, Typescripts, etc. that are very good for advanced production code. For a beginner, I recommend that you just stick with Jquery until you have to write a large codebase (>50,000 unique lines of code).
Python is just a pleasure to work with. I personally use Python to write code that solves math problems and to build small personal projects. Some people say that there is a problem with Python version 2 to 3 transition. As a new programmer this should not be a problem for you. Just start with Python 3. If there is a package that you want to use, it will probably be ported over soon. If you start with Python 2 then you will need to update your codebase for the transition which is neither fun nor worth your time as a beginner.
Ruby is a great scripting language. I think that many of the things that you can do with Python you can do just as well with Ruby. If you are already good at Ruby or know some people who can help you then you should go with Ruby. If you are new to both Ruby and Python, I would recommend learning Python since there are way more applications for Python (i.e., data science and machine learning).
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#43Everyone should start with the perl camel book, http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000271.do
I hope you're joking.
Actually those Perl books are cleverly written and fun to read (like much of the official documentation) as opposed to the dry literature of many other programming languages. You may like Perl or not but that is a fact.
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#44Depends on what you want to do. Each language has an advantage in its own domain. If you want to build for the web then I would recommend learning Javascript. You really can't avoid Javascript on the web so it is a good thing to learn it well. You can even learn Node in order to make it easier to set up a backend for your web app. The quickest way to get started with the web these days is to learn Javascript and use…
> You really can't avoid Javascript on the web
WebAssembly is coming. So unless they need to code for the web right away, pick the best language for learning, and/or the most productive language, because getting relatively fast results is how you keep young people (unless they're natural programming nerds) interested.
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#45Pythooon
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#46Python, because it's the rare combination of "wildly popular" and "keeps you out of trouble". Ruby has always had a one-framework-town kind of feel to it, with Rails being the one thing people automatically associate with the language. Javascript has the popularity, on the other hand, but it's a minefield in so many ways. The browser is not fun to work with for anything serious, and code written in node bitrots very…
OP, if you are looking for specific recommendations, this book is free and good: http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/ If you want to learn web programming, follow it up with this one that is also free: http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000754/index.ht...
Thanks, I have seen the first book before. The second one looks interesting. I think TDD is a good concept especially from an API design point of view.
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I picked those 3 because they have quite a bit of a community around each. If you are going to self learn, I thought it would be important to have a good amount of learning material both online and in book form to learn from.
The communities around Ruby, Python and Javascript are probably more oriented toward professionals than is ideal for a new programmer. While there is good content for beginners, there is also a mountain of mediocre and obsolescent content and another mountain of content that is only partially related, e.g. Rails, TensorFlow, React respectively.
How do handle sorting through that mountain of mediocre and obsolescent content?
I think that is going to be a big problem for a beginner
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP, if you are looking for specific recommendations, this book is free and good: http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/ If you want to learn web programming, follow it up with this one that is also free: http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000754/index.ht...
Thanks, I have seen the first book before. The second one looks interesting. I think TDD is a good concept especially from an API design point of view.
For me, the biggest benefit of TDD is it helps me stay focused by creating a similar challenge-effort-success loop to a video game.
Re: Ask HN: Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for teenager?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That "Which Python?" is an important question and that the existence of two versions of Python can make finding correct information harder is one of the reasons I am not wild about recommending Python to beginners -- particularly those who are going to be learning on their own.
I think your making an overly big deal about this. Never really had an issue with this doing simple python stuff.
The functional trio: map, filter, reduce is one place where it matters. In Python2 that was simple Python stuff. In Python3 map, filter, reduce is unPythonic.