Today has been a quiet day. I’m sat here in the lounge at home, wondering what to do with myself. As much as I like having “quiet days”, I always find myself kicking my heels, wondering what to occupy my mind with.
Seeing as this blog is called “The Life and Times of a Software Developer”, perhaps I should write a little about it for a change
Last night I downloaded the Microsoft .
NET IDE, and the free “Sharp Develop” integrated development environment onto my desktop machine. I haven’t installed them yet though; I’m in something of a quandary.
I want to learn more about C#, but I know that it’s a Microsoft only language, and therefore the code cannot be compiled for anything else (not easily anyway). This means none of my friends with Macs, Linux or Unix will be able to run the results. It will mean more kudos at work if I know more about C#, and seeing as the Microsoft juggernaut is starting to roll across the server landscape, it could be the smart thing to learn.
Is it really such a big deal though? I’ve done a lot of programming with PHP for instance, and to make use of it you need all kinds of stuffa web server, typically a database server, and so on. PHP is a fantastic language for “getting the job done”, but it’s “interpreted”meaning it’s pretty slow, so you can’t really use it to do anything intensive.
There are other things I should really know more about tooRuby and Python are good examples. They are both programming languages, and are both the “things to know about” at the momentRuby particularly. I’ve done a bit with Python, but not much. The hottest new toy everybody seems to be talking about is “Rails”a code framework for Ruby that does lots of programming for you. One of the guys at work has done a fantastic Chinese Chess website with Ruby. He keeps telling me how wonderful it is (he’s turning into quite the evangelist), but I just haven’t had the time or inclination to sit and learn any of it yet.
It strikes me, while writing about all these various programming languages, that I should maybe write a blog entry at some point about how programming actually works. If anybody is interested leave a comment and I’ll think about it.
It’s weird isn’t itwhile I’m quite happy knowing 4 or 5 programming languages, I am rubbish with spoken languages. I speak English, and can just about get by with French. All other languages reduce me to shouting in English very slowly. Why is that? Why can I remember how to program all kinds of computer languages? C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, Basic, Visual Basic, C#, PHP, Javascript, Java, Python it’s mad, isn’t it.