first language to learn

Sparks wrote: »

I thought that for a moment, then I remembered that this is the Development forum. So honestly, assuming someone is looking for help with a development problem (as opposed to just writing a html webpage), it's not that awful an assumption to be making.

It's very true, but how many people post to the wrong forum every day? I spend half my time as a moderator transferring threads about iPhones from the Android forum because people are too lazy, ignorant or dumb to read the title of the forum, let alone the charter.

However, this poster probably had no idea what would be the best place to post - remember, for someone who knows nothing about IT, what is the difference between Web development and Web design, for example? How many think that HTML actually is a development language? For him/her it's probably all magical techie stuff.

Anyhow, just giving them the benefit of the doubt. Either way, it's moot as they seemingly lost interest in IT shortly after their fist and only post in this thread.

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

My fear is picking up a language that won't get me employment somewhere down the line.

Well, there's no easy answer to that. You have to consider whether it is going to take off when small, if it's going to be one of the main languages adopted by whichever sector of the market you're looking to be employed in (e.g. multinationals, banks or start-up dotcoms). How successful a language is, isn't necessarily based on how good it is, from a technical perspective, but also how good it is from a commercial one. And even if it is falling in popularity, it helps to be able to gauge how much legacy work it will attract for the next few years.

All I can advise in this regard is keep your ear to the ground; job adverts will give you an idea of what languages are currently popular, or even still used for legacy projects. Various sites also exist that measure, in differing ways, what languages are in current use and how much. And of course there are numerous of the more serious programming online publications that will frequently publish their own opinions on what's hot, what's not and what's warming up...

...which is another consideration, because there's nothing better than being ahead of the curve in a technology. Learn it before most people do and you'll be able to command silly money for a while as others catch up. On the other hand, you might simply be wasting your time learning a language that'll at best be a historical curiosity in a few years time.

In other words; read, research and analyse - unless you're a complete moron, you'll be able to broadly figure out what tech will pay the bills for you in the next few years.

Also, i have heard heard of a language not being scalable, what's does that mean?

Basically, it means it can scale up to service a greater user-base. For example, your average mom-n-pop-shop Web site does not need to be terribly scalable as it's probably only going to get a few thousand visitors a month (most of which will be bots) - it doesn't even need a dedicated machine, let alone anything more advanced.

Now think of eBay, Google, even Boards, where you could be getting dozens, hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests per second - what do you think that requires in terms of CPU and bandwidth? That's when you have to start thinking about linking multiple machines, multiple instantiations of the same application server, codebase and database(s) to share this load while still behaving, to the end user, as if they are one single site.

With this in mind, some languages (and databases) lend themselves to scaling up better than others. It's one of the various considerations that you have to take into account when designing such an application, as what technology you use isn't solely dictated by what your development resources can code in (although you'd never guess this judging by how many Irish dev houses design their solutions).