Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 11:49:38 -0500 From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> To: John Almberg <jalmberg@identry.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Three wishes of a wannabe developer Message-ID: <20080209164938.GA40762@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <59CF73D3-436E-4263-836C-2404A8293504@identry.com> References: <47380.1202383890@clix.pt> <59CF73D3-436E-4263-836C-2404A8293504@identry.com>
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On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 11:01:53AM -0500, John Almberg wrote: > Bon dia, Rui (my wife is Brazillian) > > > That is t he case of economics. In the logic of freesoftware I want > > make programs to fill that vacuum. Well, some of it. What I > >want to > > do are economic model ba sed simulators. I could do it in a > > spreadsheet, but I would rather make a n ice application and > >make it > > available for everyone. For that, both competen cies in the > >economics > > and computing areas are necessary. > > I'd suggest looking into a real object oriented language, rather than > a systems programming language like C, or a glue language like Perl. > I personally think Smalltalk is a great language for beginners, > particularly the Squeak version, which is available for free for most > platforms. > > Several reasons: > - you will learn good habits > - you will, by necessity, learn and object oriented approach > - Squeak is a great learning tool, with excellent debugging tools Sounds like the main arguments that used to be made for learning Pascal. Might be good, but not subscribed to by very many. ////jerry > - there are some great tutorials and tutorial-like Squeak books > - there are dozens of general Smalltalk books available used on > Amazon, for a few bucks each. And the people who write Smalltalk > books tend to be very smart guys, who will put your feet on the right > path. Some are a bit dated and are too oriented towards Smalltalk > platforms that no longer exist, but many of the later ones are fine > for learning the concepts... I have a whole shelf of Smalltalk books > that I bought for a few bucks each. > - they have a very helpful mailing list for beginners - > beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org. It's a small list, very > intimate, few posers, mainly people who genuinely want to help. > > I'd give myself a good 6 months to a year to learn the basics... you > can't rush the first step. > > Once you get the basic idea behind objects, you might want to branch > out into Ruby, another great object oriented language. All the > concept you learned from Smalltalk will carry right over, and since > many Ruby folk are coming from the procedural world (and really don't > get objects), you will have a leg up on them. > > And Ruby will set you up for using Rails, which is an ideal platform > for deploying web applications, which will allow you to make your > economic simulations available to anyone on the net. > > Just my two cents. > > Brgds: John > > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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