The languages....

Potemkin

I have just discovered the world of programming not too long ago and I am in search of a site that will give a nice description of the avaible programming languages out there.

For the past couple of days i have been doing some research and am alittle over whelmed about all this new stuff, theres soo much!! I am thinking if i had a list of the languages and what they do i could narrow it down into what i would enjoy the most and what area or areas i should look into.

I am not sure what area of programming i would want to focus on so a general overview would be great!

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards, John

onion2k

Theres hundreds of programming languages available. The more common ones:

C, C++ .. Proper compiled languages, very flexible, used for most traditional applications.

Java .. New(ish), supposedly fixes a lot of the problems in C++.

C# .. A new Microsoft language that does most things C++ does but with nicer structure.

VB .. Old language thats meant for prototyping applications but people use it for real applications instead. Has a bad reputation.

PHP, ASP (vbscript) .. Web oriented scripting languages.

Perl .. Text manipulation language that gets used to make web sites.

SQL .. Database query language

ADA .. Managed code language that produces very robust applications

LISP .. List programming language designed for loop and recursive things like AI.

BlitzBasic, Blitz3D, BlitzMax .. Games programming language thats ace.

Whitespace, Brainfuck .. Interesting languages that are designed to be very difficult to use.

Assembly .. Old school low level stuff.

Theres loads and loads more.

planetsim

Nice little list however Google can save you cramps :p

http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/lang-list.html
http://www.humblepie.com/linkclang.html

Sgarissta

Python : Dynamic language (similar to PHP in that respect) used for just about everything. Whitespace is important to syntax.
Ruby : My new personal favorite. Very similar to Python, except with a "looser" syntax.

bubblenut

Originally posted by Sgarissta
Python : Dynamic language (similar to PHP in that respect) used for just about everything. Whitespace is important to syntax.

Yep, if you've got a handy little bash script or something to convert all your tabs into four spaces don't run it on your Python scripts, it's not big and it's certainly not clever :p

Sgarissta

Originally posted by bubblenut
Yep, if you've got a handy little bash script or something to convert all your tabs into four spaces don't run it on your Python scripts, it's not big and it's certainly not clever :p

That sounds exactly like something I would do.

Merve

QBasic: old!

ForTran: stands for formula translation, used in the past for mathematical applications, but some die-hard ForTran fans still use it today. Why? No one knows.

Sxooter

And you can't forget REXX and JCL.

Even if you want to!

pohopo

This is all my non expert opinion....

I am assuming you are interested in web programming so you need to learn three areas.

Need to learn HTML and Javascript for your presentation layer.

Need to learn C and VB as almost every language is based on this. Once you understand these two then almost every programming language will be easy.

Need to learn SQL as this is where you will store and manipulate your data.

With this you can program in almost everything. I always believed that if you are serious about programming you should understand it all.

Sxooter

Originally posted by pohopo
This is all my non expert opinion....

SNIP

Need to learn SQL as this is where you will store and manipulate your data.

SNIP

And please, for the love of all that is holy, learn relational theory whilst learning SQL, as without it, you are doomed to write SQL that makes baby jesus cry. Whereas, once you have a grasp of relational theory, SQL Becomes much easier to comprehend, and your data becomes much more coherent.

LordShryku

The future of all programming is Cobol. Seriously.

And ditto to everything Sxooter just said...

Sxooter

Object Oriented Cobol (and yes, there is such a thing)

http://objectz.com/oocobol/tutorial/

LordShryku

There's something very, very wrong with that...😃

pohopo

sometimes I think of SQL as an art as the best structure to your database is almost never obvious as fully normalized is rarely the best way. this is why you usually have people dedicated solely to this job as you can do so much in this area.

Weedpacket

Logo
Mathematica
INTERCAL
POV-Ray SDL
Mercury
Prolog
Otter
Haskell

There are about as many languages as there are tasks for computers to do. So, figure out what you want to do (the "problem domain"), and then find out which languages were designed for that domain.

C# .. A new Microsoft language that does most things C++ does but with nicer structure.

Exists only because Microsoft lost its court case with Sun over Java licensing.

pohopo

Exists only because Microsoft lost its court case with Sun over Java licensing.

Actually I believe that was for the Java they were using.

C# is the best thing they ever did as it is easy to learn if you already know C. Though they have not given up on VB, it is going down the drain as much of the development done by MS is in C#.

Soon we just need to learn C syntax and VB will go the way of Fortran.

planetsim

Hmm I was under the impression that they didnt think of VB much anymore and suggested that with the .NET framework you should use C# for majority of applications.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by pohopo
Actually I believe that was for the Java they were using.

Exactly. The "Java they were using" breached the terms of the licensing agreement they had with Sun.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by planetsim
Hmm I was under the impression that they didnt think of VB much anymore and suggested that with the .NET framework you should use C# for majority of applications.

Maybe Microsoft has woken up to the fact that no-one else does BASIC any more - and like maybe there's a reason for this?

planetsim

Yes I think so I remember seeing an article on microsoft about it, however it was about 1yr ago and cant seem to find it.

Theres still the hobbyist that uses Basic however for business Basic is almost non-existant.