Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why he pushed you should learn "the popular one" so hard, unless he meant that ironically. There's no way to choose the most popular language from PHP, Ruby, and Python.

I do agree on books vs. blogs though. When I started learning Python as my first real language this summer the best source I ended up learning from was LPTHW[1] (I used the free online edition). I think a book like that is a good tool for learning a language, because it makes sure you hit on every important feature/concept in that language. However, I later bought a physical book for $30 about Django that didn't do anything except hold my hand and walk me through what could be a 20 minute Django tutorial on YouTube. Maybe it was just a bad book, but when it comes to learning a framework/stack, I think the documentation provided if you choose one of these so-called popular options will be plenty, and from there it's tinkering and screwing up that gets you there.

[1] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

I deliberately used a dated example because I figure it would probably ring a bell with a lot of people. Realistically this is a choice a lot of people were probably making around 5 years ago, and the answer at the time would almost undoubtedly have been PHP. Or Java/JSP. From what I've seen I think PHP is a pretty horrid language, and we all know how boring Java is. But the point is five years ago they were both well documented and it was easy to find answers if you got stuck, which wasn't as true of the others, especially for web programming purposes. Once you learned PHP it would have been pretty easy to understand where Rails or Django was coming from as they became popular, and "get" how they differed from PHP and why it mattered.

As I was reading his post, I was thinking that the perfect example of the sort of technology his methodology would apply to right now is the recent explosion of Javascript MVC frameworks: Backbone, Spine, Ember, etc. Using his approach, Backbone would be the obvious choice to start off with.

...I also used that as an example below the main example :-) And I have come to the same conclusion as you re: Backbone.

I think that was his way of saying just pick one. Whichever one seems to you like the most popular, go with that. Because it doesn't really matter which you choose, what matters is that you start.

I think he also was trying to make the point that the more popular the language is, the more resources there are to reference when you get stuck.

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