Languages
February 1st, 2010 (Web)Lately, I’ve been on a kick of wanting to experience a broader set of languages, frameworks and programming techniques. I listened to an (epic?) episode of FLOSS Weekly with Kent Beck on Extreme Programming and have been thinking about going back to some of my textbook learning in college and applying it to real projects.
First off, I’m going through a Python book as I figure it is not too huge of a leap syntax-wise from PHP. Aside from a little bit of syntax difference, there are a few nuances conceptually (everything is an object, different data structures like tuples, etc…), but for the most part, it seems to be pretty straightforward so far coming from a PHP background.
However, I’ve been hearing a few rumblings lately about PHP gaining a little more traction as a respected language – Facebook after all uses it. In fact, an employee at Facebook has even been rewriting PHP from the ground up for speed. It sounds like it may finally be a compiled language which could help with performance issues.
Other platforms I would like to dive into include Ruby (and RoR) as well as going a little deeper with Javascript frameworks and some of the nuances between the toolkits/frameworks. I also like the idea of accountability that is a part of Kent Beck’s “Extreme Programming” style.
For now, I’m picking Python to use for my next personal project. Once I pick a project, I need you to keep me accountable to finish it.
Python is a language that I’d love to learn well, but I’ve never really had a good motivating reason to break down and do it. On the other hand there seems to be a little bit broader support and compatibility for PHP (at least with regards to web programming) and PHP 5 (especially 5.3) can now do many of the cooler things that made python intriguing.
If you want to learn Object-Oriented programming better, you should really start with Smalltalk. Then, you’ll have good foundational theory and practice before jumping into hybrid languages like Python or Perl or Ruby.
Randal, I will definitely take your suggestion about learning Smalltalk – I hear you talking about it a lot on FLOSS =). Keep up the good work on the show!
Matthew…yes, it helps with motivation to learn a language if there is an existing project you can use it with. I agree as well that PHP has more widespread support with many of the hosting services which is one reason I have always used it in the past.