Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

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That’s great, two for two! Thank you.

What would you say is the best starter language these days? Java? Python? Something else like C++ or Rust? I am not a coder at all. I mangle configurations and implement functionality upon request, but I always run up against scripts and CLI and I am no expert in bash or powershell and I don’t have to quit vim. But I get by okay. Not a dig, I just admit I only know as much as I do primarily from self-learning and doing. That’s why I care to learn what I’m not seeing because I’m not able to do it yet: the code.

There’s just so much to not know, especially about setups and small things that impart outsize benefits or functionality, like dotfiles for instance. All these things are so hard to learn in isolation. It’s hard to have scope and find the rails under you to know how to turn and move yourself around in the dev space, in a basic computing, nuts and bolts sense, if that makes any sense. So if you have any tips about things like that, let me know. For example:

https://missing.csail.mit.edu

They even link back, how nice!

Python is very commonly recommended as the "gateway drug" to programming, and for good reason. It's extremely well used, sought after, and easy to get into.

When you feel comfortable with programming fundamentals in Python (everything from variables, functions, loops to classes and modules) I'd recommend looking into Go or Rust -- the latter is probably more of a challenge but it makes sense as a step up from Python.

My extremely personal opinions about the rest of the languages you mention, and these are my personal opinions so there's no need to tell me how wrong I am because personal opinions almost always are wrong (to someone else):

- Java: Highly sought after in the market but mostly found in legacy code bases, bloated (JVM) and not very well liked by developers apart from some scenarios where it's already used, or those that have been working with it for a decade.

- C++: Hated by everyone except those that are already very proficient in it and is quickly being surpassed by Rust, by no means a useless language but not one that makes sense to pick up from scratch in 2020 unless you have a specific reason to.

I’m more into applications of technology, and security is a focus. For instance, doesn’t meterpreter use Ruby? That didn’t make the list, but I couldn’t say why. Maybe it’s not as easy to learn? I’m just grasping at this point.

Would you say it’s worth looking into C++ due to legacy codebases?

Sure, if you want to understand stuff written in C/C++ then that's an obvious use case for learning it. The same goes for any language. Ruby isn't worse than Python by any stretch but my personal view is that it got really popular due to "Ruby on Rails", on its own it's very similar to Python which seems more widely used.

If security is what you mainly care about though, maybe you'd just enjoy diving straight into rust rather than C++.

C++ is still used extensively, even for completely new projects, in computer graphics, databases, etc. Relatively new projects I’ve seen it used: TileDB, tensorstore, core Apache Arrow, etc. CUDA programming is C++ at the bleeding edge. I’m in the process of updating my C++ to C++17 and there’s definitely been a lot of changes over time in the language. I would agree that for many, they’d go with python and let others accelerate that python with underlying C/C++ they wouldn’t have to see.

The problems with Python are performance and tooling, especially dependency management and deployment. Figuring out the happy path is highly dependent on your particular circumstances. Someone might tell you that Pipenv worked well for them, but when you try it, every single pipenv operation takes 30 minutes. Others tell you that vanilla pip works for them, but you care about reproducibility and they usually respond with some variation of “reproducibility is unnecessary”. Similarly, if you want to deploy statically linked artifacts, you pretty much have to use Docker or one of the zip file solutions (the latter are nice, but they don’t bundle the runtime or .so files—at least in some cases) and these always end up being 10-100 times bigger than an equivalent Go binary (for non-toy programs, anyway) which is a big problem for things like AWS Lambda which has a 250MB limit on binaries. Python the language is easy enough, but all of the things surrounding the language are brutal and for whatever reason we handwave away those concerns as though they aren’t important.

I'll +1 on Python, a lot of languages are a bit of a pain to set up as well (I'm thinking back on setting up a LAMP stack for the first time, shudder ). It's a great general purpose language and often used as an alternative to churning out Bash scripts, and Bash is IMO too difficult for most practical applications.

Isn’t Docker supposed to help with this? Is there a LAMP reference implementation or VM, or a script to init a LAMP environment, if I’m even saying this right. I feel like such a noob sometimes and my first PC ran DOS a long time ago. That’s probably connected, although I also ran Linux, just not for daily driving. Computers are endless amusement to me in that way. There’s always more to learn or do, or others to talk to about what they are learning and doing. It’s great.

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