Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

If you are going to try to use it to earn money and you are looking for the shortest return on investment, JavaScript hands down.

If you just want to learn programming and logic for the pure interest of the subject, then personally I would go with C or assembly, and tinker with embedded stuff.

OO Java or Python.

So as you can see, it really comes down to what you want to learn it for. I am making an assumption that by mentioning LAMP and Ruby that you are looking for web languages? If that is the case then Ruby, Scala or PHP will suffice.

But, take note, with the way web apps are moving JavaScript is your best bet, as more and more people are dumping the server side web templating languages and implementing their view logic in HTML / CSS / JavaScript.

Personally if I where starting out, I would learn how to build the front end with HTML / CSS / JavaScript and then learn how to implement REST services to supply data to that front end, in one of the aforementioned languages.

Wow, hadn't thought of Javascript (thought immediately of Python). Javascript is a solid suggestion. It gives you immediate gratification, definite marketability and puts the learner in front of a number of juggernauts (RIAs, mobile, all web).

But it's kinda whacky as a language, so might lead the learner down a confusing path (if they want to learn any other languages later). Also, the learner's going to get wrapped up in crazy browser DOM nonsense.

But it's kinda whacky as a language, so might lead the learner down a confusing path

That is why I focused so much on what the parent wanted to do. If it is fastest ROI and market place skills, it's JavaScript. If it is to learn the art, then Python or Ruby or the laundry list of others will be a better choice. Then again, web apps are probably not the best place to learn the pure art of code, which is why I suggested embedded, if it is just to satisfy intellectual curiosity.

Thanks for the advice. I'm not really expecting to earn money working with it as a job but more to tinker with on personal projects. Do you have a recommendation for a good JavaScript book?

JavaScript: The Good Parts http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748

Thanks

Obviously JavaScript: the good parts is a piece of seminal work and really got people to think of JavaScript as a respectable technology. As well JavaScript the definitive guide is good. Further, I generally recommend that people learn jQuery or Dojo first and then dip into pure JavaScript. The reason being, is that the code base has been heavily peer reviewed, most bad practices get rejected from commits. As well, most of the documentation, uses sound patterns. Think of it as coding JavaScript with training wheels. It will focus your learning on the good parts of JavaScript.

So would you recommend me to "dump" Python and use JavaScript for any future web apps i might build or is there not much difference?

That is really a personal preference on how you like to develop web apps, but from my observation, a lot of new projects that I have been exposed to are forgoing your traditional server side web layer (e.g Struts and Tile in the Java world) and using a CMS to do static templating (pushing static HMTL to a web server) and JavaScript widgets / JSON for the dynamic stuff that communicates to REST services on an application server.

They are then using server side languages they are comfortable with (in your case Python), to implement JSON services.

It is less "dumping" Python and more using Python to emit and consume JSON.

Syntactically Python and JavaScript are very different languages but the underlying concepts have a fair bit in common. With the emergence of HTML5 there is going to be increasing amounts of demand for more browser side JS coding. On the server side it depends on the framework you choose. Can recommend using Chrome, the developer tools are built-in and very good.

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