From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Sep 7 11:37:30 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from sword.cisco.com (sword.cisco.com [161.44.208.100]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93B0437B424 for ; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 11:37:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sjt-u10.cisco.com (sjt-u10.cisco.com [161.44.208.184]) by sword.cisco.com (8.8.5-Cisco.1/8.6.5) with ESMTP id OAA00026; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 14:31:36 -0400 (EDT) From: Steve Tremblett Received: (sjt@localhost) by sjt-u10.cisco.com (8.8.5-Cisco.1/CISCO.WS.1.2) id OAA17582; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 14:37:34 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200009071837.OAA17582@sjt-u10.cisco.com> Subject: Re: what language should i learn next ? To: jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org (j mckitrick) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 14:37:34 -0400 (EDT) Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <20000907165111.B4757@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> from "j mckitrick" at Sep 07, 2000 04:51:12 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL1] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG +--- j mckitrick wrote: | | | depends on what you want to do. | | my personal favourite is perl, but i don't know python anyway. | | you could try all of them and see which one you like most. | | I want to avoid that, if possible. I'd like to make an informed decision | from the beginning so I can use my time efficiently. I guess what I want to | do is learn the tools that require some skill and that are efficient for | common jobs on a unix box. That way, if the door ever opens for a unix | career, I would have valuable skills that would set me apart. But I would | also like my knowledge to be useful now, on my little non-networked laptop. | | Frankly, since I am not running on a network anyway, I first need to think | of some problems that need to be solved, or some tasks that can be | automated. | If you want to stand apart, learn as many tools as possible. You should remember that tools are secondary to the problem at hand - the more tools you know, the better suited you are. I've always found that to be a bonus in interviews to know a bit about a lot of tools. "I've used it once or twice, and have some notes. I have a foundation for when the situation calls for it." Of course you should know a lot about whatever you're interviewing for ;) You should think "I want to create an inverse-thingamajig" instead of "I need to write something in Perl". Create your thingamajig and then think "Boy this function was a real dog to write in [Language X]. I wonder if [Language Y] does this better?" If you're looking to choose, my recommendations are: 1 - Perl - very useful & powerful Jack-of-all-trades language 2 - Tcl - easy & useful, Tk is very gratifying for a novice 3 - Java - easy language & very nice, but not very useable - limited support, and existing implementations are slow. I'll probably get shot for saying this, but if you know C++ (or even C), you can learn Java in hours. my $0.02 Canadian :) -- Steve Tremblett Cisco Systems To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message