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Programming query
I thought about messaging few select people about this but it may be applicable to more people than I'm aware of so I just thought I'd throw up a thread.
What programming language do you think is "the best" (yes, I know its subjective) to learn? I ask because I am presently unemployed and have been trying to learn things to make me more employable.
My previous programming experience is basically nil. I took 2 C++ classes in college roughly a decade ago. My one friend who is an IT professional scoffed at learning python and instead suggested trying to learn HTML5 since (in his estimation) there aren't*(edit) many people who know a whole lot about that just yet. Any input is appreciated!
What programming language do you think is "the best" (yes, I know its subjective) to learn? I ask because I am presently unemployed and have been trying to learn things to make me more employable.
My previous programming experience is basically nil. I took 2 C++ classes in college roughly a decade ago. My one friend who is an IT professional scoffed at learning python and instead suggested trying to learn HTML5 since (in his estimation) there aren't*(edit) many people who know a whole lot about that just yet. Any input is appreciated!
Post edited by Dromaro on
Comments
An IT professional who scoffs at Python deserves himself to be scoffed at, says this senior IT professional.
@Rym - Ok, he didn't scoff so much as upsell HTML5 FAR more than python. Like to the point of basically saying, "Python? Whatever. Here is why you should learn HTML5."
Also, you are already going in the wrong direction. You came to a forum to ask a question that has been asked about 10 billion times on the Internet. The number one thing in being a technology professional is asking Google everything first. Then if Google somehow fails to answer the question, ask one of the Stackexchange sites, such as Stack Overflow. Even then, don't actually ask the question unless it hasn't been asked already. Programming is perhaps the single most well documented thing on the entire Internets. It's an extremely rare occasion when you actually have to ask a human being for any programming related knowledge.
And how does one learn to program with a language being involved? I see the point you're driving at but it seems to preclude what I'm asking.
http://bennesvig.com/2011/12/05/youve-probably-read-enough/
"Oh, someone's asking which programming language to learn. Someone will say Python, someone might say Java, someone will ask what they're trying to do, and Scott will definitely say 'Doesn't matter, just learn to program.'"
Never change, forum.
Scott, you should make a blog titled "why you're doing it wrong."
If you are wasting your time reading this you are doing it wrong.
Logic, in all its forms.
Problem Solving. Potentially including algorithm or systems design.
Math. Never underestimate the importance of it.
Knowledge of Technology. This includes hardware, software, and the languages you use.
With regards to the initial question, picking a language is like picking a tool from a list of tools. Rym mentioned Python so I'll go there. Python is a great tool (for me at least) for getting a solution to a fixed problem relatively quickly. But I don't personally use it to build websites, crunch incredible amounts of data (where speed is a concern), and for various other projects. You can do all of those things with python, but for various reasons I keep other tools at-the-ready for the job.
There are programmers that live an entire lifetime with one language and do so fairly well though - I'm just recommending what I think is the best practice coming at the topic. There are people that have lived their entire life in Basic, or Perl. Both valid tools for certain jobs, but I feel better equipped than them if I was suddenly unemployed.
As it turns out, a former coworker of mine at Blizzard got a job with a firm in LA county and they are totally teaching her how to code. She said she basically had no experience before landing there and they are helping her learn Python. If I could get basic skills while I apply there, maybe this could work!
As far as what language is best, it all depends on what you're doing. I work in C and C++, but I'm a systems software programmer who also does some kernel hacking and you need something lower-level like C and C++ to do that along with some occasional assembly to help with debugging. However, I use Python for a lot of my general purpose scripting (such as when writing tests that would be a pain to implement in bash). I've also done a bit of Java when dealing with some GUI stuff here. The problem you're trying to solve often dictates which language is "best" -- there is no one right language for everything.
Thing is, I learned how to program purely in C and C++ and was able to self-teach Python and Java as needed because I already knew how to program.
Oh, and HTML5 is not a programming language. It's a markup language. Totally different beast (although you can do programming using HTML5 in JavaScript, but that's not HTML5 itself).
http://programming-motherfucker.com/
Tests aren't pointless. Even if you think they are, they're not.
Here's an article by a Google engineer who put a minor error in a mergesort algorithm into the JDK back around 1997, that wasn't caught until 2006. But if they had tested the edge cases (Edge case in this case being a list at least 2^31 items long) they would have found the error.
Silly example, I know, but testing is important.
No methodology is perfect, but there are many ways you can try to minimize bugs leaking out.
Let's say you are writing a controller for a joystick controlled robot arm. That's perfect for testing. The inputs and outputs are very simple and precise. It is trivial to automatically generate tons of tests.
If you are writing a web application I personally feel that testing is a waste of time. Some people out there do advocate testing web applications, but they are crazy. The input to a web application is a complicated object, an HTTP Request. The output is another complex object, an HTTP response. Even writing just one test is a ton of work that can not be easily automated.
Also, web applications interact with so many outside services that you have to mock them all up. It's like ok, we only want to test our code, not the database. So we'll make a fake database that way our tests are only testing our code. Then when you run the code for real it doesn't work because the real database is not the same as the fake one! On top of that you have to not only test the HTTP response, but the HTML/CSS/JS in every major browser.
My rule of thumb is that if it takes more work to create an automated test than to have a human test by hand, then don't even bother with the automated testing unless you are so rich you can pay someone to do it all on their own. This is why video games just have armies of lowly paid human testers. For someone to write an automated test for a serious video game would take someone of a very high skill level a great deal of time. That person has the skills to make the game, so why waste them on testing?
To that end, the Selenium plugin for Firefox is amazing.
Even so, it isn't the kind of testing that test driven development people are advocating. They want you to test every component of your entire stack individually. You have to have a test for every class, method, etc. in your entire application on server and client side.
Most of my job has functions that look like the following:
def profile_page(http_request, profile_user, visiting_user):return http_response
That is a function that takes three incredibly complex objects as its parameters and returns a very complex object as the response. A test for that requires entering so much data I don't even know how these guys do it.
- Start a backup application and backup to the appliance running the code your testing. Alternately, used "canned" backup data from the same application, depending on the test
- Make sure none of the code on the appliance crashes
- Make sure the deduplication ratios are what you expect
This is an oversimplification, but you get the idea. It's something that's easy enough to script and automate. Even with this, because of all the various interactions, etc., TDD is a bit tricky. We do have some unit tests written for certain parts of the code (and even have programs that generate fake backup data that looks like the output from real enterprise backup applications), but it's pretty much impossible to do proper TDD with all the different variables (not in the code sense) we have.