
4 Wrong Ways and 1 Awesome Way to Choose a Language - fogus
http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/4-wrong-ways-and-1-awesome-way-to-choose-a-language/
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ggchappell
> ... learning Actionscript was like drowning in quicksand. ... noise from
> complete beginners offering each other tidbits of programming wisdom, such
> as:

>> make a loop (a while loop I think)

And he says that's a problem. He's right, of course. However, there _might_
also be something very good going on here.

Some history: Back in '78 when I got my first computer, you flipped the power
switch, heard a beep, and then you were in a development environment -- a
pretty rudimentary one, but a development environment nonetheless. Now fast
forward 32 years, and we get the iPad; to program it, you need to pay $100 and
sign an NDA (or something like that).

And so some of us are asking: How are newbies supposed to get involved in
programming today? It sounds like Actionscript might be at least a partial
answer.

~~~
pufuwozu
How are you meant to use ActionScript to introduce yourself to programming?
Your options are to buy or pirate Flash (CS4 is around $699US) or Flex Builder
(from $249US).

There's a few open-source tools for ActionScript but I doubt that _any_ of the
people posting on those forums are using those tools.

My opinion is that most of the people using ActionScript _aren't programmers_.
People using Flash tend to be designers (or artists, cartoonists, etc.) that
_need code_ to get their jobs done.

~~~
ggchappell
Well, that's sad. :-(

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prosa
Interesting.

Although for Ruby (the case he cites) I would argue his "awesome" reason,
community, actually springs partially from one of his wrong reasons, namely
"readability, expressiveness and an awesome standard library".

~~~
billybob
Maybe so. I'd love to see a thoughtful article on what creates a great
language or framework community. How clean and consistent the language is?
Official documentation? Ease of transitioning from other languages? Charisma
and marketing savvy from creators? The ability for programmers to use it for
fun side projects?

I imagine that one reason that Microsoft-invented languages don't have the
culture of Ruby is that you often need expensive licenses to use them, which
you won't do unless you're making something Enterprisey (boring). Whereas Ruby
and Python are "download and hack away." Maybe that also creates more goodwill
from coders.

~~~
UpFromTheGut
Microsoft would be foolish to not give away free developer tools. You don't
need to purchase anything to use .NET; you can download an ide that comes with
a C#, VB.NET, C++/CLI compilers off the bat:

<http://www.microsoft.com/exPress/>

And besides that, you can get compilers for F#, J#, IronPython, IronRuby, etc.

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benologist
"noise from complete beginners offering each other tidbits of programming
wisdom"

This is a problem that plagues any language with both age and an active online
community.

ActionScript has been around for a decade and massive communities have been
built around it with the users dominated by people who are inexperienced,
learning, and overly-confident about their abilities. The same can be found
for HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, Java, C#, etc.

If RoR remains relevant and used for long enough by enough people, it too will
enjoy the same fate.

~~~
dagw
It isn't simply a factor of age and community size. A few years ago I was
picking up both python and php for the first time for a couple of projects and
as such spent a lot of time on both comp.lang.python and comp.lang.php (I said
it was a few years ago). Both groups where roughly equally active, and both
languages roughly equally old. Yet those two groups couldn't have been more
different. In the python group people where, on the whole, polite, asked
advanced question and got detailed answers. In the php group people where
often insulting, the questions where almost always trivial and still the
answers a best shallow and at worst completely wrong.

