Three wishes of a wannabe developer

[User Ota]

On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 09:12:40PM -0700, cpghost wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 11:01:53AM -0500, John Almberg wrote:
> > I'd suggest looking into a real object oriented language, rather than a 
> > systems programming language like C, or a glue language like Perl. I 
> > personally think Smalltalk is a great language for beginners, particularly 
> > the Squeak version, which is available for free for most platforms.
> 
> Yummy, it's a long time since I've used Smalltalk. It's still fun
> today, even though more from an academic point of view than real life
> programming. It certainly was different, compared to Common Lisp I've
> heavily used to hack in back then, and I kind of regret that both
> Smalltalk and Lisp have fallen out of favor nowadays for real projects.
> 
> > Once you get the basic idea behind objects, you might want to branch out 
> > into Ruby, another great object oriented language. All the concept you 
> > learned from Smalltalk will carry right over, and since many Ruby folk are 
> > coming from the procedural world (and really don't get objects), you will 
> > have a leg up on them.
> > 
> > And Ruby will set you up for using Rails, which is an ideal platform for 
> > deploying web applications, which will allow you to make your economic 
> > simulations available to anyone on the net.
> 
> Personally, I do prefer Python and I write hybrid Python/C and
> Python/C++ projects for a living (using SWIG and to a lesser extent
> Boost.Python or its frontends). For web development, which I can't
> avoid entirely, though I'd wish I could, I'm using Django, or some
> other custom mix of Python building blocks. In some rare cases,
> it has to be Zope-based, but this I do really positively hate! ;)
> 
> Ruby and Rails are also good places to start and excellent object
> oriented languages. Whether you go the Python or Ruby route is really
> a matter of taste: both routes do have interesting things to show and
> are definitely worth a try (or two).
> 
> > Just my two cents.
> > 
> > Brgds: John
> 

This might be off topic a bit, but personally once you wrap your head 
around objects and topics like polymorphism, basically you should be 
able to master any object-oriented language -- be it Perl or C++ or 
Java.

If you've done C++ before, one idea you can try for an object oriented 
language is C#.  I found C# really easy to use, being managed code and 
all; and the beauty of it is with the miracle of Mono you don't need to 
be in Windows to use it (or you can, without the use of Visual C#).  I 
found it a great starting point, and because of C# I extended my 
knowledge with OOP languages and began using Perl, among other things, 
to do things I wouldn't normally consider with something like VB or 
doing C/C++.


Russell Doucette.