Stay young by grabbing the developer library
by Jon Mountjoy on August 5, 2008 at 05:12 AM
My grandmother, who could do very many things, couldn't work the video remote. When I first realized that I asked myself if, when I get to that age, I would be able to program in that new language of the future? Or will I think of it as a newfangled video player that I can't control? At the time I was programming Pascal and Modula 2, and considering using the cutting edge dBase III for database driven applications.
What reminded me of this was coming across Paul Graham's Blub Paradox. To quote:
"After a certain age, programmers rarely switch languages voluntarily. Whatever language people happen to be used to, they tend to consider just good enough"
The future is looking bleak. Unless of course, we all take action. The good folk over at The Pragmatic Programmers teach: "Learn at least one new language every year"
Good advice. So don't grow old. Stay young by learning Apex and the Force.com platform by downloading the developer library! (Free, registration required, though that gets you the developer edition account, which you'll need 'cos the language is in the cloud).
PS.
Another quote from that piece by Paul Graham is:
"Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that? Not very often, if you think in Cobol. All the time, if you think in Lisp."
He is arguing here for how a different language teaches you to think differently, making you a better programmer. I wonder what the equivalent quote will be for DaaS/PaaS/multi-tenancy and so on. Suggestions?
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Comments
Posted by Mike Leach on August 5, 2008 06:17 PM:
My take is that shorter attention spans on the Internet coupled with a general need for immediate gratification have resulted in an increased interest in dynamic/interpreted languages.
I personally prefer strongly typed languages, such as Java, C#, and Apex for business applications; but we've recently conceded to familiar flavors of JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and PHP as the extension languages of choice on our platform because of this fact.
AJAX auto-complete of browser-based code is going to be the secret sauce that makes DaaS really take off and helps people to quickly learn new languages.
Posted by Jon Mountjoy on August 5, 2008 10:05 PM:
Interesting idea Mike - continuous partial attention is perhaps driving that!
Posted by David Claiborne on August 10, 2008 09:16 PM:
I first programmed in Fortran IV, writing programs by hand, punching cards, and then feeding them to a card reader. If I was lucky, I would get a result back in an hour or two.
Now, I write VisualForce pages and Apex code and Apex triggers. It is still programming, but it is oh so much nicer.
It takes a lot of work just to keep up with the salesforce.com api, but it is worth it.
Posted by Jon Mountjoy on August 11, 2008 12:48 AM:
Nice David! The wikipedia entry for FORTRAN IV notes that this was the release that added boolean expressions and the IF statement! So much changes so fast.
Posted by disanpoter on August 11, 2008 09:05 AM:
I disagree with Mike, somewhat, but admittedly come at it biased with a preference for PHP.
Rather than associating the growing popularity of dynamic/interpreted languages with shorter attention span, I associate it primarily with advances in technology - particularly processing power and memory - opening up development to innovation from people whose perspective rests more on the content side than the technical side.
dynamic content can be more focused in the information it delivers and interpreted languages allow for adaptive programs and processes whose only limitations are the processing capacities of the engines and the imagination of the developers. With the dynamic set it's far easy to set up feedback cycles of code modifying code or editing the metadata that gets evaluated along with the code at runtime.
From this perspective, Apex/VF are particularly interesting in the way they have combined compile-oriented and dynamic-oriented practices into their PaaS and DaaS models.