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Evening Reading
by Steve Gibson, Jul 19, 2007 3:59pm PDTYes, another new feature showing up in test form is the new download servers on FileShack with support for download managers and new locations. We'll have a technology overview and more info on what we're up to detailed on FileShack in the coming weeks but for now just try it out and see. If you don't have Mercury service, it's available to fuss with on the latest Civ IV Beyond the Sword Demo. So here is this stuff:
- Pricey space vacations :(
- Ultracold
- They solved checkers!
- Landing on Mars
So I posted earlier about learning to program:
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=14788038#itemanchor_14788038
So it seems like the consensus is either C or Perl. Perl and/or Python would directly apply in my job, and while I have dabbled in Perl a bit I've forgotten it all. It was very confusing to me, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better for me to start with something I could apply right away rather than learning C to get the core concepts down. I have a feeling learning C first would probably benefit me in the long run.
What is Ruby all about? It seems like a cool language that would be easier to learn, but i can't tell how well it would apply when I went to learn new languages.
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Python has a philosophy of "one way to do one thing". The syntax is much more regular and simple than perl, and they go so far as to have the block structure of the language controlled by its indentation. This means that basically the formatting of python is uniform between different programmers, and they do this in order to try to make it easier to understand. Python is much better as an object-oriented programming language than perl is, but it used to have some kind of weird legacies in its object model, like an inability to inherit from objects that were defined in C inside the interpreter itself, which was artificial and annoying. I think that has been addressed now. Like perl, it has a nice selection of libraries to do pretty much anything you would want to do.
Ruby is sort of half-way between python and perl. It's a great object-oriented language but its syntax still has some perlisms (more than I would like, actually). Ruby has more influence from functional languages like lisp, but unless you know lisp or scheme, you probably won't notice. One of the things most people learn early about ruby is that it has a wonderfully expressive syntax for iterating over a collection of objects and applying operations to them. In fact, it is much more general than that, but that is how you'll see it first. I really enjoy the ruby community and their approach and attitude.
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