Comment by joshfenmore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshfenmore | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the reply. Luckily I am not gonna start from scratch scratch since I have a little experience with front-end and I am "familiar" so to speak, with the programming "environment" but I never really dived into it (a very stupid decision).

So for:

1. Some people told me I should start with C and go on from there, while others told me to start with C# or Python. Am I wasting time with C? I've seen some articles here where some guys went straight RoR and managed to get an app running in months. I feel like I would skip important stuff if I do that. How important is the order in which you learn these? I think this is the hardest thing for me. To choose which one goes first on the backend side I mean.

2. So it shouldn't be a problem to go for an old mac right? I don't have 2K right now for a maxed MBP.

3. Well I figured I can do it on a 10-15h a day marathon for 4-6 months. So I can't do a YC demo for example?Something to show to investors or enough to express an idea?

4. I believe I got this covered although everyone is pretty busy these days:)

I am actually working for a startup who is prepping an app for investors approval, and what we have found is speed, and progress is important. I would definitely recommend RoR because the speed to development is so critical. With Rails it isn't unrealistic to have a MVP within 3 months. Especially with 10-15 hours a day.

And you can get a macbook air for around $900-$1300. That's all you really need, nothing fancy.

And if your app is meant to be mobile, you can get deep into mobile web development and even create a very native experience. That's what forecast.io did.

Also as you probably know, in startups it's more about proving a model than having a fancy piece of software. Think about what features are going to attract customers asap. Iteration is easier when you have customers giving you feedback.

IMO RoR is the fastest way to make those vital iterations. Once you're sitting on your $5 million in venture cash you can worry about architecture and scalability.

I've seen some online courses like CS50 with C and MIT with Python. The question is why are they starting with those programming languages and not going straight to high level languages?

That is one of my main worries actually. I want to have a solid foundation and principles of how I should build something. Or is my thinking flawed?

The goals of those courses are different from the goals of building complex software. Courses are designed to teach you how a language works in both theory and practice and they generally go through a language and help you understand what parts of it do and why it does what it does.

Nearly all modern languages have developed as some response to C, and Python is also studied because it has a good reputation as a first language.

Software development is about coordinating work so that it produces a product that is reliable and also on time and under budget. This is the sort of thing you can learn, somewhat, by examining the code and work done in open source, but mostly you learn it by working in a (good) software development office. It's important, but not something that is easy to teach while you are also learning how computer languages work.

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