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Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

#41

Post by mattyb »

Scriptor wrote: post #30
sidjoshi wrote: post #15

PHP

Rather surprising to see PHP so high here since I rarely see PHP-related submissions on HN. How do people learn it? I've found that the best thing for me was finding StumbleUpon and reading up as much as I could about best practices in PHP and programming in general. Now I force myself to try a different language for my own projects to get away from PHP as a "comfort zone".

I'm a bookworm, so I sought out well-regarded books on Amazon. I started with 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' by Welling & Thomson, and could not have been happier. It's hefty (nearly 1,000 pages for the latest edition), but was well worth the time. Next up was 'PHP in Action', which is similar to the later chapters in Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python (one hell of a book, btw) and was coauthored by Chris Shiflett.

I've since read two of Ullman's books (PHP for the WWW and PHP 5 Advanced), the Powers books (PHP Solutions and PHP Object-Oriented Solutions), and Shiflett's 'Essential PHP Security' (the PHPSec guide is required reading also).

The two Apress Pro books ('PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice' and 'Pro PHP'), 'Essential PHP Tools', 'PHP5 Power Programming' (Andi Gutmans is a coauthor) and 'Advanced PHP Programming' by Schlossnagle are up next, although I'm currently working through SICP.

(Note: I switched to Postgres since reading Welling & Thomson; there are basically 10x as many MySQL books as PostgreSQL ones, unfortunately)

Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

#46

Post by inaka »

locopati wrote: post #4

Erlang - why? after diving into threading in Java for a recent project, I wanted to see other ways of approaching the same problem - recommendations for other languages with powerful threading solutions?

Erlang uber alles. i love it. it just works. when i'm done and my project works, i keep wondering where all the code went.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

#47

Post by jrockway »

locopati wrote: post #4

Erlang - why? after diving into threading in Java for a recent project, I wanted to see other ways of approaching the same problem - recommendations for other languages with powerful threading solutions?

Haskell. Don't waste your time with Erlang.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

#48

Post by Scriptor »

jrockway wrote: post #47
locopati wrote: post #4

Erlang - why? after diving into threading in Java for a recent project, I wanted to see other ways of approaching the same problem - recommendations for other languages with powerful threading solutions?

Haskell. Don't waste your time with Erlang.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

#49

Post by _cbsz »

radu_floricica wrote: post #40
cema wrote: post #24

Clojure.

Just wanted to say it's hard. I'm definitely not the best programmer, truth be told I haven't even programmed full time for a while, but switching from java to clojure took me at least half a year. I'm in the middle of my first (small) full app though, and I can tell it will be worth it. With java there was a wall in productivity I simply could not brake. I wrote pieces of code sometimes as fast as I could type (simi…

I would not advise this style of programming, because it creates a very tight binding between the application logic and the interface. In fact, it's exactly the problematic style caused by GUI builders that generate event handlers and ask you to fill them in.

Re: Ask HN: What programming language are you currently learning?

#50

Post by jongraehl »

dkarl wrote: post #36

I'm learning Scala for the following three reasons (in increasing order of importance.) These just reflect my current needs, not a prescription for other people, and all three revolve around my need to add a practical language to my repertoire to reduce my usage of C++ and Java. 3. I decided to learn a language I could use on the Java platform using Java APIs, rather than on the _nix C platform using C APIs. Partly t…

Ocaml isn't too pure. It's just weaker in libraries (and has no threading). It's faster than Scala in my experience, but not by more than 50%.

I like Scala quite a lot so far. The main pleasure of Haskell or Ocaml over Scala is that they can deduce all your types (even function arguments), whereas Scala supports overloading and can't.

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