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What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

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What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#1

Post by jesseddy »

Before you burn me at the stake, please hear me out. I'm a UX designer by trade; while not a developer, I do understand software and technology very well. I spend a lot of time testing and tinkering with ideas by trying to hack them together the best I can. My goal is to build a small but real feeling version of my idea to understand and test if there's actually value. I continually hit the wall or spend hours getting caught up on something trivial (I understand this is part of the learning process). Like for most people, time is an issue for me and I'm really looking for something to help me prototype quickly. I consider Ruby and Python too big for that (am I wrong)? What should I focus on, a Javascript framework, just jQuery, something like Haskell, etc.?

Advice?

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#3

Post by jardaroh »

This depends entirely on what you are making. If it is heavily datadriven and you are only prototyping an ORM will help you immensely especially if it creates your database structures for you, for this I reccomend Django (Python). If you are not beholden to a heavily datadriven system you can go with Flask (Python). If you however do not even need a backend to talk to, lets say you do not need data consistency or storage at all, you can get away with an entirely client side javascript solution and later plug in a backend. JQuery is awesome, I use it every day and it makes life a lot easier.

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#5

Post by jesseddy »

jardaroh wrote: post #3

This depends entirely on what you are making. If it is heavily datadriven and you are only prototyping an ORM will help you immensely especially if it creates your database structures for you, for this I reccomend Django (Python). If you are not beholden to a heavily datadriven system you can go with Flask (Python). If you however do not even need a backend to talk to, lets say you do not need data consistency or sto…

Thanks, didn't know about Flask I'll check it out!

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#6

Post by phantom_oracle »

JavaScript frameworks are not easy to learn.

Just to add to what the other folks have said, if you are looking to rapidly prototype something with a backend, perhaps using Rails with all its gems will allow you to do so. You will have to eventually learn Ruby and Rails itself though, but I am sure there are a ton of "putting it together" tutorials out there.

Just plug in the multiple pieces and you're good to go.

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#7

Post by onion2k »

The easiest language to learn is whichever has the best tools available to you to learn with.

If you're someone who can just read a book and go from there, try a few books and go with whatever one you like most. If you prefer learning by being taught, find courses need you and learn the language that they teach. If you want to learn online, go to Coursera or Treehouse and pick an option. And so on.

Don't choose an "easy" language and then struggle with the learning material - pick good learning materials first, learn how to write some simple code, and then use that knowledge to learn a more appropriate language for what you have in mind.

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#8

Post by lmm »

I think you're wrong to dismiss Python and Ruby; they're much more elegant than javascript (javascript fans will say its ugliness is superficial, but when you're starting out the superficial things matter), and not as complex as Haskell (complexity that will help you out once your program gets above ~10k lines, but will get in your way as you get started). I'm not sure where you're coming from with the "too big"; the core language syntax for Python is very small and simple, the reason the download is large is the large standard library. Which, again, is what you want as a beginner. (For a larger, more production-oriented project it's more important that there's a good standardized library system and project management tool, and to be honest the Python ecosystem falls down somewhat here. But by the time that becomes an issue you'll have learnt what you need to to respond appropriately)

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#9

Post by talmir »

You might be approaching this from the wrong direction. Maybe you dont need a programming language at all, but rather some user interface sketching tool?

If you want to learn programming itself, there are very few shortcuts as you will have problems along the way if you dont have the basics down. Pick a language and dive in. I will probably take less time than you think.

Re: What's the Easiest Programming Language I Can Learn

#10

Post by collyw »

Python is nice in that it is a powerful language with advanced features but you don't need to use / understand those features to get started. So while you may view it as "large" language, you can get started without understanding these things.

If you contrast this with Java, Java is a smaller language, but forces you to use object orientation, so you generally have to have a better understanding of abstract concepts from the beginning.

Anyway, that's two of the languages I know reasonably well. Out of those two I would go for Python.

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