While I have played around with sed/awk and perl and shell scripting in the past, in recent years I’ve spent more time using programming languages than scripting languages. This summer I’ve been playing around with Python a bit, though I’ll probably get more into it once I think of a good problem to solve using it. I thought about picking up Flash, but between it being so closed and it being difficult to just see your code, I decided to pass on that bit of frustration. Somehow I didn’t think of Javascript at all, though I do not do much web development so perhaps that is not too surprising. This discussion of the maturity of Javascript and the APIs for it has got me thinking that maybe it ought to move back up the priority list. If the APIs have gotten good enough to smooth over browser differences in a robust manner, that really would make web programming look more inviting. Of course, I return to the problem of needing a project to implement to really give the language a good test, but I think I’ll be keeping my eyes open this fall for places where I might get to try out one of these tools.
Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
The main problem with “learning” javascript is that you don’t really need to. Everything you need to learn to do with javascript can be figured out by doing a google search and spending a few minutes looking through the first few results.
Yeah, this is why I need to come up with a problem to solve that requires Javascript – I’d like to be more hands-on familiar with it because right now I’ve never done more than tweaking a few lines in a preexisting script and I can’t really call that knowing the language. But it does seem that the learning curve will be pretty shallow…