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Go R, Young Man
theodp (442580) writes " Learning to code has become a mainstream fascination," writes Brian Liou in Why are YOU learning to code?, "but all the evangelization has been misleading. The problem in our Chris-Bosh-codes-so-should-you society is that people learn to code without first asking "for what purpose do you want to use code?" What in your day-to-day work could you actually automate using code? Let's face it, your odds of creating the next hot iPhone app aren't great, but the spreadsheets you look at everyday or the strategic business decisions you or your company makes? Coding can help you with those. Coding to better understand data would help everyone." Leada co-founder Liou's advice? "So to all non-technical professionals looking to get technical: If you want to become a software engineer, by all means learn Ruby or go through the JavaScript tutorials on Codecademy. But if you're simply a business professional looking to gain an edge on your peers, trust me, you are much better off learning R." So, did Mark Zuckerberg steer 100 million K-12 coder wannabes down the wrong path with the JavaScript and Ruby preaching?"
1) You have to choose a programming language to learn with. You don't learn to program in a vacuum.
2) A non-technical person doesn't want to learn tons of programming languages especially when they have no relevance to their business. Hence the suggestion of the article writer that they focus on something like R over Ruby/Javascript since it's likely to have more relevance to them.
CEO of data analysis company suggests people learn data analysis language.
In other news, CEO of Erlang Solutions thinks Erlang is great. No word on why.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's a statistical computing environment. R is much closed to what VB was pre-VB6 - a loosely defined domain specific language with lots of libraries aimed at a specific task. It's not really a general purpose programming language and not a great one to learn if you want to learn to program.
If you do a lot of number crunching and want to move beyond Excel, R is a great choice (as is matlab, s-plus, or any of the others aimed at analytics).
If you do analytics AND want to learn to program, go Python and NumPy/Pandas.
If you just want to learn to program, VB, JavaScript, Python, Java are all good. Just find what you'd like to program and see what languages people are using.
And yes, at some point, pick up a few more languages if you find you like programming.
-Chris
> My biggest fear is we're fostering the next generation of crap coders
Really? Mine's clowns.
Bark less. Wag more.