Thread: What are some fun simple languages to learn.

It's syntax hurts my brain...

LISP is one of the greatest programming languages ever if you ask me. I think learning it is a very good experiance for all programmers, even if you never really use it. A lot of people I talk to prefer Scheme as it is more minimalist, but I prefer Lisp myself. If I wanted a lisp-oriented language to embed, I would much rather use Scheme however. I'll give Scheme a good wack one of these days though, so my preference may change, but I doubt my opinion on Lisp/Scheme in general will really ever change.


I also believe that Erlang is very well worth a look. It's messaging system and design from the ground up to be concurrent and distributed is extremely interesting if you ask me. I actually wrote a blog post on Erlang just a week or two ago, got quite a few hits from Reddit. I think it's an extremely powerful language and it offers a lot of cool features. While many languages these days have concurrent and symmetric libraries for process concurrency, Erlang is different as it has a very powerful Message-based system for passing data inbetween erlang processes. I find the mechanism very powerful and appropriate for Erlang.

The thing is, after working a lot with PHP on medium-sized projects (~4 people, a few thousand lines of code), I don't think it fun anymore. At all.

It lacks the safety static languages such as Java provide, while not providing the flexibility really dynamic languages such as Ruby or JavaScript offer.

It lacks the safety static languages such as Java provide, while not providing the flexibility really dynamic languages such as Ruby or JavaScript offer.

I can't say you're right about that. PHP is safe. Have you ever caused a "server crash", "buffer overflow" or something like that with PHP? It is not possible. I think PHP is FUN. It's easy, safe, fun and what do you think most of the web sites in the world made their systems with?

I'm talking about safe as in type safety, early error detection, all that stuff a compiler can do for you.

And yes, I have caused a server crash in PHP. (It was a bug in the engine, but still ...) And over time, dozens of buffer overflows have been detected (and fixed) in various PHP functions.

I know it's easy. I know it's not safe: it encourages bad practices. Look at any PHP+MySQL tutorial out there, and you'll find that it probably uses string concatenation to build queries with data - an invitation to an SQL injection the moment magic quotes are switched off. And in some other circumstances.
Ah, magic quotes. Source of many a stray backslash in text.
Then there's register_globals and how simple it is to use uninitialized variables. Together, these are quite the killer.

The success of PHP comes from its ease of installation, ease of learning (but it's far harder to learn it properly), great availability, and of course its huge built-in library. It's great for quickly doing something.

But larger systems are, in the end, an abuse of PHP. Its lack of proper package management, hard-to-predict include paths, lack of namespaces and unit-local functions, all those work together to make large systems rather awkward.


To me, PHP is a language to get work done in, just like Java. But it's not fun.

Browser-based games
Message boards
Portals
Online shops

Internet is all PHP. There are few exceptions.
Even the page you are currently looking at. You can't deny it. It's there.

I still think PHP IS fun. I have made many many funny things with it.

I'm not denying anything.

I have my own web server running on my computer.
It can't be accessed from elsewhere but I can test my PHP things.

PHP can be compiled... a program like phpBlender or something like that.. been a long time since I looked into it.

I have been on projects with 7+ people working on massive amounts of PHP code and making it work with Java. We eventually changed to using Perl CGI for most of the work and background stuff, and PHP just for the pretty dynamic frontends you can make easily.