[ale] Any language (wuz: Assembly Language?)

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

I think Leam has a good point about fun.  If you have a choice, using a fun language will motivate you to learn more and do more with the language.

I know we've discussed programming languages a good bit here before, but it's always an interesting topic, as people's perspectives, industry, and available resources do change.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I'm leaning away from trying to learn programming as a money maker, despite having several years of professional experience in Clipper many years ago.

There are a couple of reasons.  First, learning "a language" to a professional level of competence is FAR more complex now than it was back in my Clipper days.  In essence, at that point, neither the internet nor GUI's were an issue.  I had to create a simulator maintenance tracking application and make it work in a multi PC multi building multi campus LAN environment.  That's L A N, as in LOCAL area network.

Security was not a big concern since there was no outside access to the lan and the only people with internal access were department employees.  I was running DOS / Novell.  My app, if it was running, was the only thing running on the PC at the time.  There was no mouse, no event driven programming, and no sharing of PC resources with other apps.  If they wanted to run Wordperfect, they'd shut my app down and run the other one.

Even though I'm a big fan of GUI's as a user; as a programmer, they really complicate things.  Now you have all the resource sharing issues that come into play when the user, such as myself, has 75 Firefox tabs open, a LibreOffice slide show, a music app, and YOUR app.  You have all the issues of switching in and out of context, and the fact that the user can and will hit any combination of keys or mouse strokes at any time.

Just CONNECTING your app to the internet opens up a whole nightmare of security concerns which keep security professionals up late at night, and some of which Mike T has mentioned in the PHP discussions.  It is now one to two orders of magnitude harder to audit your application for security flaws, and you have to continually update it forever and incur the overhead of continually patching bugs and security flaws, ah la Flash or Java.

In the OLD days, you created the program, made it work to within specs, tested it, and didn't have to do much more to it, unless business needs changed.  It could work for decades, and many big core of business systems do just that.

Also, I have noted that any large project, like Firefox or LibreOffice or a modern OS, cannot be done usually without a large team of developers.  I'm more of a lone ranger or small team type of guy.  I've always said I'd rather design the space shuttle than design the nut on the bolt on the control panel on the dash board.

Given the above, I think it would be harder to get to the level where someone would put me on a programming team than it would to get to the level of earning money with my other skills, primarily writing, and hopefully graphics design (which I have to learn).

Thus, my desire to program comes simply from a desire to be able to create custom programs to do computer tasks to scratch my own itch as it were, or help projects I'm interested in.  This perspective has changed over the last few years.  I might wish to create my own database of stars I've observed if I get active in astronomy, or create a custom data logging program for an electronics project, or even a custom OS for a robot.

One problem is time.  Learning more about writing, doing the writing, marketing it, and learning about graphics design take lots of time, and those will probably have to be front burner items.  Learning programming again also takes lots of time.  But, that will probably have to be a back burner item.

Here's what I want in a language.  Given what's been discussed, assembly language may not be the right choice, even though I do find the concept interesting.  My language needs to be fun or programmer friendly.  It needs to help the programmer, not get in his / her way.  It needs to be compiled to an executable, with no vm or interpreter in the way for performance reasons.  It needs to be fully cross platform for at least Windows and Linux.  It would be nice to be able to run on Mac too, but I don't own one.  Android support would be nice too, but may not be possible with the same code base.  And, it needs to be capable of producing fully GUI and network aware apps.  It needs to support multi tasking and multi threading and multi processing.  Finally, it would be nice it if supports multi paradigm programming.

I may never write LibreOffice, but I want a language and toolkit that would allow me to.  I may gravitate back to GO, since it seems to meet most of these parameters, IF I can allocate the time to it.

Sincerely,

Ron



Leam Hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:

>Ron, et al,
>
>I think the most motivating things about a language are the community 
>you associate with and the "fun" you find in the language. Right now, 
>PHP is the most "fun" for me so I am building my software engineering 
>skills with it. I want to learn, or re-learn, other languages, but of 
>the ones I know PHP is the most fun.
>
>That's a big decider for me. Then finding a community to have fun with.
>
>Leam
>
>

-snip-



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Ron Frazier
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