Calling all programmers! What entry level language should I go for?

[dmb85]

Originally Posted by Barna Biro

@dmb85: ActionScript 3.0 is by no means a scripting language.

What is your reasoning for this?

I say its a scripting language because it can only be executed in the Flash Player, and you do not have direct access to memory, the garbage collector, or the file system. Oh, and its got the word "Script" in its name

[ASWC]

The real definition of a scripting language is that it doesn't need to be compiled. That's not the case for Actionscript so it's not really a scripting language for that reason.

[Barna Biro]

Exactly what ASWC said. For example: Javascript and PHP are both scripting languages but ActionScript 3.0 is not. The lack of manual / explicit memory management and other features have nothing to do with it...

[dmb85]

Originally Posted by Barna Biro

Exactly what ASWC said. For example: Javascript and PHP are both scripting languages but ActionScript 3.0 is not. The lack of manual / explicit memory management and other features have nothing to do with it...

Fair enough... i'll amend my statement to be an ECMAScript-derived language like Actionscript or Javascript.

[ASWC]

To be fair you are both right in a way. Even tough AS3 is compiled, it is still retrievable by decompilation which is not the case with 'real' compilation. So it is really a sort of hybrid of script and non script. But none of the reason dmb85 gave to name a language a script apply to any language. You can't control GC in Java but that doesn't make it a script for example.

[Barna Biro]

You can decompile stuff written in C or C++ to some extend as well. The thing is that ActionScript 3.0 does have to go trough some compilation / packing process in order to be played by Flash Player while PHP and Javascript can be written, modified and run on the fly. Of course, ActionScript has "scripting roots" ( going back to AS 1.0 and 2.0 - but AS 3.0 is a more "real programming language" ) and it can feel "weird" maybe because of it's more dynamic nature compared to other OOP languages.

So, I am not saying that ActionScript doesn't have a "scripting feel to it" ( because of it's history and dynamic nature ), but at least the current version ( 3.0 ) is not really considered to be a scripting language, but an object oriented language ( over the years both JavaScript and PHP have added some object oriented support but still, neither can really be considered "object oriented languages", their scripting nature still being quite predominant ). I personally seriously dislike PHP and Javascript...

[ASWC]

PHP is now a fully OOP language (starting really with version 5). I wrote quite a lot of classes with it so far and it's way better than procedural for me which I used to do before version 5. There's even some type checking possible introduced when you work on OOP!

[Barna Biro]

From what I can remember it still has no proper data types support. Sorry, but I just can't consider that language OOP... If it were possible, I'd ban it by law. But yeah, in the end it is about personal preference... I'd rather sell hamburgers than work with PHP, Javascript or similar stuff on a daily basis ( I can at most somehow tolerate them for a really short period of time, especially if I am trying to help a friend ).

Edit: http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php seemingly not even the authors are yet considering it an OOP language but a "widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language". Something I can also agree to...

[wvxvw]

My very first language was Q-Basic But I can't remember anything from it. First language I used for real was ActionScript. I learned myself, well, I stretch, I learned with my friends, who were more experienced then me, and more experienced in other languages too. It was maybe the best time for Flash, when it was actively developing, the time of big changes, new editors, new big projects...
Few years later I started to ask myself, what other language should I learn, because Flash seemed like already explored area + it had an image of not very serious language + in the end, you just want to know more...
So, the first other language I got familiar with was PHP. It didn't catch on, and after some first contacts I realized that the PHP community is rather the same kind of mostly amateurish self-taught folks like Flash community is. I never got a real life project to do in PHP, and, looking back, I'm happy it never happened.
Next language was C#. Probably, at that time I started to see some patterns that appeared cross-language. C# for some time looked very attractive as more conscious, more thought through, with more scientific background than ActionScript.
I tried to write plugins for FlashDevelop. Got familiar with HaXe... HaXe started to totally make sense to me. Through HaXe I learned about other marginal languages, or, rather languages which are marginal today. By being around HaXe I acquired a more general perspective on programming languages stock. Got some basic understanding of why languages become more or less popular, started to be interested in natural languages in connection to programming languages. Then came more language agnostic things, like understanding what von Neumann computer is, what are the alternatives to Turing machine, stack-based virtual machine, functional languages, lambda calculus, typed lambda calculus. Then came math, the theories supporting programming, the theories that describe our world. With it came understanding of how languages like C#, C++ or Java are an oversimplification (which doesn't mean they are simple systems, however, the tools they provide you with don't reflect the reality properly).
This is how I came to Lisp. I saw it before few times, but never actually realized what it is. Today I don't understand why languages like Java or C# or ActionScript for that matter even exist... it looks just like one huge misunderstanding
I also tried Erlang, Prolog (just a bit). I'm learning Haskell, but I'm not a big fan of what I see. If life was ideal, I'd never had to write in any language other then CL

But, probably, if we want to be practical, C/C++ for games, unless you are interested in AI, in which case nothing better then CL had ever existed.

[Barna Biro]

I think I actually hate Lisp and Prolog a bit more than PHP and similar kinds... No offense but Lisp is for people who often suck as professionals and thus feel the need for attention ( also most likely because of some other childhood traumas ) and use such languages / dialects to somehow stand out of the crowd ( making them feel "special" for a short time ) or in hope to get "WOW that looks complicated" from newbies ( other people who are not familiar with these things ). Of course, I am not saying that exceptions to the rule do not exist... I am also not asking anyone to agree with me, it is what I have personally experienced / seen / concluded after spending quite some time over the years talking to Lisp programmers and University professors / assistants who teach Lisp / Prolog.