Happy New Year! Welcome to 2004

We’re currently in Atlanta celebrating the new year, so if you need us please give us a call.
I thought about this, a few days ago, and thought I’d ask for opinions. If you were to learn a new programming language, what would you learn? Flash, ASP, PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, Java?
One of my “New Year’s Resolutions” is to learn a programming language. PHP is probably the one I’ll learn, as it’s on every server I touch. It seems like an interesting language, I like it better than the little bits of ASP I’ve picked up.

This entry was posted by 2000-2005 on Thursday, January 1st, 2004 at 1:01 am. It is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “Happy New Year! Welcome to 2004”

  1. For personal interest I’m going to probably teach myself PHP some time in the next year becuase, as you said, its everywhere today. For professional development, however, Perl seems to be the language one needs to know in order to get hired so who’s to say?

  2. I would ask myself two Questions. Which lang would I benefit most now? Which langs have a real future?
    First Flash is not really a language but more of an enviroment similar to Photoshop. ASP would be OK if you thought IIS has a future. Apache-asp is only perl based as far as I remember. Coldfusion is fine but implementation is limited because of the steep costs involved.
    So in my opinion you have 3 good choices: PHP, Perl and Java. I personally believe PHP would serve you the best for the work you do. A good knowledge of perl is always good, but as long as you can look stuff up efficiently you are fine. Java is good but I don’t know about the real future of it.
    All three of these are similar in ways. Once you learn basic ideas of programming, learning other C derived languages is not difficult. Want a challange? Learn Squeak or Lisp.

  3. I think I’d either delve farther into Perl (I know a little) or advanced Flash ActionScripting. It’s changed quite a bit with MX 2004.
    Having worked with all the technologies you mention to some degree, I think PHP is a good choice. Open source and all that and very powerful.

  4. Hi All,
    I really don’t see myself sticking with ASP much longer, but I’ll probably get screwed into working with it again. I’ll probably be stuck with IIS longer than I want simply because of a couple of projects planned in 2004. I use both Perl and PHP under IIS, so it’s efficient in the fact that I can build under OS X or Linux and implement under LAMP or IIS. If I can phase ASP out (at work), then that’s a little sacrifice I can make. I won’t mind running one section of the site as ASP with everything else pushing PHP. I’d like to push something more open onto my clients’ sites, though.
    Reed, You’ve always said that learning the basis of one programming opens the doors to others. Even before I thought about posting this, that was going through my head. Not ready for LOGO or Lisp, but PHP just seems like a good set to follow. I just like how PHP is a “friendly” language to learn, ASP isn’t friendly at all (like most Microsoft tools), and Java seems like a lot of work for minimal effect. Flash is highly scriptable, but (for some reason) I completely hate Flash.
    I never thought about the cost of using ColdFusion, but that does knock it out of reach. I played around with it ages ago, at a previous job, but never had time to really learn it’s approach.
    Let me pose this question another way: If I want to get hired, what would you recommend? I’m a designer, not a programmer. There are enough programmers out there, but where could I fit in?

  5. PHP in my opinion would be the most marketable of those choices. You already have experience with Perl and ASP so as far as resume fodder, you can include those. ColdFusion is not really too marketable except for people that are already tied to it.
    With PHP, you can also work with many different database systems and get experience with them, such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle…. That is also good for getting a job.

  6. Yeah, we were down in Morrow & Rex for the holiday, visiting some friends. Next time I’m down, I’ll take you up on your offer.

  7. When I first read “We’re currently in Atlanta celebrating the new year,” I thought, dang it, I read this too late. But then I thought about our activities New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day (which is also the wife’s birthday), and realized it was pretty much a two person gig anyway. But next time you’re down here, I’d love to buy you a beer.
    As for languages, my only background is the good intentions of learning them. But it seems to me that with the nearly ubiquitous combo of PHP, Perl, and MySQL, you can do most anything you need to. The others listed seem too “platform dependent,” in terms of future growth. And it’s a well know fact that creating Flash movies kills brain cells.
    So I’d go with PHP, for starters.