Learning Programming

In: Technology By: Brian Armstrong

20 Jun 2011

I was tutoring someone in web app development recently, and the monumental task in front of him really hit me. He was trying to learn and use nine new languages at the same time.

In our case it was:

Ruby
Rails
MySQL
Bash (command line usage)
HTML
CSS
Javascript
JQuery
Git
(Capistrano, Yaml, nginx, ??)

Even though some of these aren’t true languages in the traditional sense, they appear this way to newcomers since they are each a new syntax to learn.

If you slowly built up these skills over 15 years, they are clearly separate concepts in your mind. But for a newcomer trying to use them, it’s not even clear which one is which.

Is that a Ruby method or a Rails method?

Is “script/server” a shell command or is “ls” part of rails?

Is this file html, js, or css? (actually a mix of all three)

He made a comment along the lines of “wouldn’t it be great if you could build an entire web app in one language”, and I started thinking about it.

GWT (Google Website Toolkit), ActiveRecord, CoffeeScript, and Heroku are all steps in this direction. You could classify them generally as trying to “eliminate a language in the stack” or allowing you to do a piece of the stack in a language you already know.

Obviously there is a trade off here between power and simplicity, but I’m wondering – would it be possible or desirable to get an entire web app down to just one language? If not that how few could you use?

Btw, I think there are benefits to seasoned developers here as well. I remember Lars Rasmussen (creator of Google Maps and Wave) mentioned something to this effect at Google IO in 2009, that GWT allowed him to spend his mental CPU cycles at a higher level and be more creative (not having to worry about cross browser css or js). So the benefits of higher abstraction may not only be for newcomers.

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9 Responses

Will Thompson

June 20th, 2011 at 3:05 pm

Obviously it takes years to become proficient in all the technologies making up a stack, but I think the clear advantage is modularity. And you can avoid getting locked in to a specific platform, a huge advantage for a long term project that needs to stay current.

Chuck Cohn

June 21st, 2011 at 2:55 am

I’ve always toyed with learning to program and I think you just permanently scared me off … what’s the opposite of a motivational speaker?!

René

June 21st, 2011 at 8:08 am

I get the GWT and ActiveRecord-Part, but in which way is CoffeeScript (and Heroku) a step in this direction?

Paul

June 22nd, 2011 at 5:59 pm

holy crap. So how is someone supposed to learn development if they aren’t already well versed in several programming languages?

It doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a one size fit all solution anytime soon, but I like where you’re going with this.

Andrew

July 5th, 2011 at 4:03 pm

I am learning to program and have reached the conclusion that what I really need to do is start when I was 20 years old!

John

September 15th, 2011 at 1:29 am

When I started out as a programmer 15 years ago. You learn as you go along. For example, I started out as a Visual Basic programmer. I felt could be productive at. As it turns out my first computer job was writing and performing data conversions and I was the company web master. I used Visual Basic very little in the company web site’s ASP pages. However, I gained new skills in learning about many databases and SQL. Then I went on to Cold Fusion jobs. Now I work as an ETL programmer. So my point is if you have a good programming and business background, your skills are portable through your career if you work at it. As for your question “would it be possible or desirable to get an entire web app down to just one language?” It is very possible. However, I learned through the years that many corporations use many different apps and platforms to service their business.

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November 27th, 2011 at 4:18 am

I find GAE+GWT or GAE with other client-side scripting, close to becoming a perfect solution but it still has some serious shortcomings. I had to create several custom code for some simple problems because of its restrictions.

Now I am thinking of learning Python+Django and I find myself at level 0, barring the general ideas I have about object-oriented, structured or sequential programming and some programming patterns. I think, its best to evaluate pros and cons of each language set and then select one to put to use.

Breaking Free

Learning Programming

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