Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Language Should a Former Coder Dig Into?
An anonymous reader writes "I was a consultant for nearly 20 years and I got into projects where I had to work with a huge variety of software, operating systems, hardware, programming languages, and other assorted technologies. After retiring from that I have spent the last 10 years in a completely different sector. Now I find myself wanting to really focus on coding for personal reasons. You can imagine how out-of-touch I am since I never really was more than a hack to begin with. I can learn syntax and basics in a weekend, question is, what Language should I become native to? Never liked anything 'lower-level' than C, and I don't have the funds to 'buy' my development environment....help me Slashdot, you're my only hope."
Python, Ruby, Perl and their ilk are very useful for throw-away scripts, and even small applications. But beware if you're thinking of using any dynamic language for anything beyond a small application, especially if there'll be more than one or two developers working on it at any given time.
When working on larger projects, especially involving many developers, any time saved due to the capabilities of dynamic languages will be lost debugging problems that the compiler would've caught when using Java, C#, or C++.
I agree. A friend's startup was originally based on Drupal. It fell over at a million records. They moved to Ruby on Rails. It fell over at 20 million records.
I'm in the middle of resurrecting the system, and not a day goes by that I don't say "WTF did they do this in a scripting language?"
Scripting languages are fine for scripts, and even occasional prototypes, but if you need to scale, you need a compiled language. Frankly, I'm not too fond of Java for production systems either.