Having recently understood the power of Lisp thanks to reading The Nature Of Lisp and then working my way through the early chapters of Practical Common Lisp (by Peter Seibel, also author of the excellent Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
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GUI tools for Lisp
Do “Hello World” examples help you when learning a language?
Traditionally, the first program contained in a programming language tutorial is “hello world”, that is outputting the string “hello world” to the console terminal. Do you find it useful?
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The problem with learning a new language
Like many programmers, I know the basics in a few languages (php, perl, python, ruby, javascript, C++, Go). However, I only know one language well (Java). By “well”, I don’t mean “perfectly” or even “near perfectly”, I mean “well”. I have a good grasp of its core concepts and I know how to find and understand the info on the things I’m a little bit more fuzzy about. However, it seems that there is a race to know as many languages as possible.
HTML5 sample code for drag ‘n’ drop and many more features
If you are the type of programmer who learns by reading code and hacking it, head over to HTML5 Studio, a new area on Google’s HTML5 website with sample code provided for Geolocation, Columns, Drag & Drop features and many more.
I quote from the site
Peek around, look under the covers at the source, and feel free to reuse the code in your own applications and sites.
Go Google?
Following from my post Programming and web development tools – too much reliance on Google?, I am now left pondering about the Go programming language, a “systems programming language” developed by Google.
On one hand, the premise of Go is quite interesting. While still in its infancy, Go proposes to solve the problem of designing systems software for multicore machines and its syntax seeks to be as clear and as fun as the syntax of dynamic languages such as Python while actually being a static language.
On the other hand, it is yet another Google tool and one can’t help thinking that Google really has got their fingers into many different pies when it comes to coding projects (Google Android OS, Google Chrome browser, Chrome OS, Google Web Toolkit, Google Ajax APIs etc) and they are bound to ditch a few of them along the way. Apparently, they do not use Go yet for their own systems so who’s to say this won’t be dead in the water in a couple of years?
So, is Go on your list of programming languages to keep an eye on? On your list of programing languages to learn? Or on your list of programming languages to forget about?
(When) Should I learn another programming language?
Every few weeks, I come across a programming article/blog post/project/forum debate etc that gets me excited about another programming language. I maintain a list of languages I’d like to learn, a list of applications I’d like to do, a list of skills I’d like to develop.
Every so often, I ask myself if I should start learning a new programming language, and which one to pick (so many to choose from!).
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