[OT] Programming Languages

Not Responding <[email hidden]> wrote:

: Any ideas?

Python would be the nicest and most portable option. Start with
the O'Reilly books.

Perl would be another option.

Arthur

--
Arthur Clune PGP/GPG Key: http://www.clune.org/pubkey.txt
Don't get me wrong, perl is an OK operating system, but it lacks a
lightweight scripting language -- Walter Dnes

On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:39:32 +0100, Not Responding wrote:
[snip]

Quoted message said:

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Any ideas?

C, C++ are still alive and kicking, and similar languages such as PHP are
also options.

However, if you insist in staying under windows, you're going to either
have to look at the cygwin/mingw environment, or look at *paying* for
compilers!

Steve

Not Responding said:

More than a tad OT but I know there are some techies here and google has
turned up too much information to be useful.

Anyway, I'm feeling the urge to do some recreational programming. I used
to be a bit of a computer nut; as a boy I build my first computer with a
soldering iron. My career started out as a software engineer until the
sirens of promotion and salary drew me off course. As well as work, I
always used to enjoy programming /as a hobby/. But it dawned upon that
since my Psion Series 7 died a couple of years back (and with it, OPL)
I've not touched a compiler in anger.

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Any ideas?

Bollox to Windoze, install Linux, learn PHP/MySQL and start writing
online apps, without all that .NET bloat.

--
Chris

Chris said:

Not Responding said:

More than a tad OT but I know there are some techies here and google
has turned up too much information to be useful.

Anyway, I'm feeling the urge to do some recreational programming. I
used to be a bit of a computer nut; as a boy I build my first computer
with a soldering iron. My career started out as a software engineer
until the sirens of promotion and salary drew me off course. As well
as work, I always used to enjoy programming /as a hobby/. But it
dawned upon that since my Psion Series 7 died a couple of years back
(and with it, OPL) I've not touched a compiler in anger.

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once,
Visual Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems).
What do I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases,
use the Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to
manipulate.

Any ideas?

Bollox to Windoze, install Linux, learn PHP/MySQL and start writing
online apps, without all that .NET bloat.

This http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html claims to install all I
need to start PHPing under windows XP home edition.

I might give it a go - if I can summon up the courage to install
anything under windows.

"Not Responding" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

More than a tad OT but I know there are some techies here and google has
turned up too much information to be useful.

Anyway, I'm feeling the urge to do some recreational programming. I used
to be a bit of a computer nut; as a boy I build my first computer with a
soldering iron. My career started out as a software engineer until the
sirens of promotion and salary drew me off course. As well as work, I
always used to enjoy programming /as a hobby/. But it dawned upon that
since my Psion Series 7 died a couple of years back (and with it, OPL)
I've not touched a compiler in anger.

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask the
right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do I
want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the Windows
GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Any ideas?

I suppose it partly depends upon where you want to play in code-level -
application level space. We tend to use C# a lot - but lots and lots can be
done higher up just working at the xml / soap level which is a very
interesting space.

Cheers,
Graham

Arthur Clune said:

Perl would be another option.

If you have a large masochistic streak that is! :-)

Jon

Not Responding said:

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Any ideas?

Drop VB. C# seems to get some reasonable press and would put you on
track for cross-platform stuff if wanted to go that way. Java gives you
reasonably simple GUI stuff and net access, but expect to find at least
one badly thought out bit of the language at some point (lack of
unsigned types is a favourite!). I personally use Java, but I do have
some reasonable background with it now, and don't have the time to learn
something new.

Jon

Steve said:

On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:39:32 +0100, Not Responding wrote:
[snip]

Quoted message said:

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Any ideas?

C, C++ are still alive and kicking, and similar languages such as PHP are
also options.

However, if you insist in staying under windows, you're going to either
have to look at the cygwin/mingw environment, or look at *paying* for
compilers!

Steve

you can download the .net sdk - which includes the all the stuff you
need to develop .net apps (winforms, asp.net etc etc) from microsoft for
free..... you pay for the IDE not the compiler - if you want a free IDE
(integrated development environment(ie; syntax highlighting project
environment)) look for sharpdevelop on www.sourceforge.net.

good fun, you can do cool stuff quickly and very marketable

Not Responding said:

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Try Java. It's similar enough to C++ that your learning curve shouldn't
be steep at all, it's very portable, there are tons of code out there,
and JDBC database connectivity is usually excellent. Integration with
GUIs is also rather easy as a general rule

--
Jesus died for your sins. Make it worth his time.

Quoted message said:

My question is, where do I start?

Depends what you want to do I guess. For me, I like number crunching,
always have done, in various absurd ways, and for me, nothing is
better than Fortran....espeically now in the hands of Intel. Love it,
it really kicks numerical ass. But there again, what do I know, just a
poxy manual worker, no, place here dude :-)

Garry

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

My question is, where do I start?

FORTRAN 77. You know it makes sense.

Pete.

Not Responding said:

More than a tad OT but I know there are some techies here and google has
turned up too much information to be useful.

Anyway, I'm feeling the urge to do some recreational programming. I used
to be a bit of a computer nut; as a boy I build my first computer with a
soldering iron. My career started out as a software engineer until the
sirens of promotion and salary drew me off course. As well as work, I
always used to enjoy programming /as a hobby/. But it dawned upon that
since my Psion Series 7 died a couple of years back (and with it, OPL)
I've not touched a compiler in anger.

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic.

C is still the industry standard. C++ is very much alive, but has grown
bloated and suffers from instability (i.e. the spec has a history of
changes that cause subtle problems with older code), and writing
cross-platform code in C++ is challenging. Visual Basic and PHP are
tools of choice for non-programmers who are happy if they can get
toy code to sort-of work (Perl has a foot in that camp too, along
with a more serious side). Java has substance; python is somewhat
similar but with a much better substance-to-hype ratio; both will
encourage an o-o approach (which C++ won't, unless you're already
thusly inclined). A scripting language like Perl or Python makes
it very easy to write cross-platform code. In principle, so does Java,
but it's a bit like plug-and-pray in that it can be harder to fix
when portability fails.

More important than choice of language is to find and use appropriate
programming libraries for whatever you do. Advocates of a language
tend to know that language's libs. For example, someone mentioned
JDBC as a reason to use Java, but didn't mention the equivalent
frameworks for other languages (such as DBI/DBD, libdbi, APR).

--
Not me guv

In article <[email hidden]>,

Not Responding said:

This http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html claims to install all I
need to start PHPing under windows XP home edition.

I might give it a go - if I can summon up the courage to install
anything under windows.

xampp makes it dead easy to install although occasionally you'll come up
against something that doesn't work on Windows but does on everything
else. Stick with MySQL 4.0 and PHP4 for now if you want to use the PEAR
libraries from http://pear.php.net as they've not got them working on
PHP5 yet. I'd argue that Apache 1.3 is also more stable to develop on
also than 2.0. Otherwise PHP5 has better object orientation. PHP4 is
very basic in that regard.

PEAR makes things a lot quicker to develop so it'd be an idea to get
used to that.

'Web Database Applications With PHP and MySQL' 2nd Edition from O'Reilly
would be my book of choice if you want one but php.net has loads of free
help anyway and there's tutorials all over the net.

However, PHP is more of a web application/scripting language so don't
expect to develop GUI apps with it that run outside a browser.

Personally, for GUI apps I'd go with C++, Java or C# (or the open source
Mono version of C#). Just avoid the Microsoft-isms in C# if you want the
application to run elsewhere. More about Mono at -
http://www.mono-project.com/

If you want a full on IDE for C, C++ or Java then consider buying a Mac.
You can buy a complete Mac for the price Microsoft charges just for it's
compiler environment and Apple gives it's tools away for free and
doesn't charge for membership of it's developer network unless you want
pre-release OSs - http://www.apple.com/xcode/

XCode 2.0 is due in a couple of weeks with MacOS X 10.4. The Mac also
has the best Java environment - Gosling himself uses a Mac.

IME, Cocoa development (with XCode) on a Mac is a joy compared to
programming the Windows API if you just want to do it for kicks and
you're not bothered about cross platform work. Otherwise Mono/C# or Java.

IBM do a free IDE called Eclipse which gets some good press particularly
for Java development. http://www.eclipse.org/

Shaun

Not Responding said:

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

Any ideas?

Python, Perl, or (my choice, but it's not exactly mainstream) Ruby.

Ruby is, IMO, the most elegant of the three, and Perl the ugliest, but
Perl has a better range of libraries.

--
Keith Willoughby http://flat222.org/keith/
"You've sunk my battleship!"

Shaun Murray said:

Personally, for GUI apps I'd go with C++, Java or C# (or the open source
Mono version of C#). Just avoid the Microsoft-isms in C# if you want the
application to run elsewhere. More about Mono at -
http://www.mono-project.com/

If you want a full on IDE for C, C++ or Java then consider buying a Mac.
You can buy a complete Mac for the price Microsoft charges just for it's
compiler environment and Apple gives it's tools away for free and
doesn't charge for membership of it's developer network unless you want
pre-release OSs - http://www.apple.com/xcode/

I'm finding more and more that our clients are moving away from GUI apps
and client based software. The first question they always ask now,
before they even see any software is, "Does it run in a browser?".

At least two clients of mine now use thin clients only (a very minimal
Linux run from CD) - everything they use is server based.

The other refreshing trend we are seeing is a move away from IE. Hoorah!

--
Chris

Not Responding said:

My question is, where do I start? I'm so out of date I can't even ask
the right questions. I used to write in Pascal, C, C++ and, once, Visual
Basic. That was all mainly under DOS (or for embedded systems). What do
I want to do? I'd like to be able to tinker with databases, use the
Windows GUI with ease and pull stuff off the internet to manipulate.

I'd go for C#. Database connectivity is good, GUI design isn't so
hard it distracts from writing functionality code, and there are
free IDEs available.

Personally I prefer Delphi but that's quite expensive these days.

--
jc

Remove the -not from email

Arthur Clune said:

Not Responding <[email hidden]> wrote:

: Any ideas?

Python would be the nicest and most portable option. Start with
the O'Reilly books.

Another thing to consider about Python is that if you have a Nokia
Series 60 mobile phone you will be able to write apps that run on
that.

--
Andy Leighton => [email hidden]
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

Pete Bentley said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

My question is, where do I start?

FORTRAN 77. You know it makes sense.

ITYM

FORTRAN 77. YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE.

Dynamic memory allocation? Fortran is great if you know what it is you are
going to be doing. Otherwise C/Assembler still kicks butt for numeric bits.

My take on it would be

What do you want to do?

You can get real databases such as PostgreSQL for free on Windows (or Linux,
or Mac). languages: Perl, Python, Java, PHP all available for free on
Windows. All will do CGI (web) stuff and database bits.

I will admit to not really having done much with these on Windows, being
more of a Linux monkey myself. All these languages are available for free on
Windows, Linux or Mac and high level stuff is reasonably portable.

I'm moving back into Java as we are shifting our emphasis towards the Web
Services/Grid area but most of my research code is in Perl.
PostgreSQL is my RDBMS of choice though I will use MySQL if forced to.

My desktop is a mac, my servers are all Linux.

...d

David Martin said:

On 7/4/05 12:25 am, in article [email hidden], "Pete

Bentley said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

My question is, where do I start?

FORTRAN 77. You know it makes sense.

ITYM

FORTRAN 77. YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE.

Dynamic memory allocation? Fortran is great if you know what it is
you are going to be doing. Otherwise C/Assembler still kicks butt for
numeric bits.

Doesn't really matter. /Real/ programmers can, as I'm sure we're all aware,
write FORTRAN programs in any language...

--

Dave Larrington - http://www.legslarry.beerdrinkers.co.uk/
World Domination?
Just find a world that's into that kind of thing, then chain to the
floor and walk up and down on it in high heels. (Mr. Sunshine)