I think Tier 1 will just disappear and you won't see a language with the market share / dominance that C / Java held again.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you going to be doing? A bootcamp?

There's a chance of me not finishing school too, so I'm always curious to hear what other people plan to do.

halfway thru an associates and then hoping to get a sort of paid internship at a local code giant. already made decent contacts and impressions, so that should help. Plan on a fair amount of on-the-job learning, but hopefully the school and the on-the-side studying i'm doing will be enough to prepare me for entry level

i feel at this point like most of what college is good for is if you're going to do research or super math intensive work, which doesn't particularly interest me.

Really? With android apps running java and the JVM, what do you think is gonna happen to it?

I agree with a lot of the criticism against java and think there will be a downturn i'm just curious as to this statement specifically

Google could convert Android to one of its own languages and force the change.

Doubt google switches from Java on Android to anything else anytime soon.

Developing in Android with Java is very beginner friendly and actually simpler than developing for iOS imo.

I'm talking 'after' Java and not so much about Java disappearing anytime soon.

But I think it's reasonable to think that going forward medium/long term we'll see more fragmentation of programming languages in the web and mobile universes. I don't have any specific knowledge to make me think that but it just seems likely to me.

Hey!

I am a beginner programmer with less than 20 hours of casual coding behind me.

I found the odin project and i really thought it looked interesting. I like a very structured learning environment / curriculum as i tend to goof off otherwise.

Will this teach me solid programming fundamentals? I am more into learning how to think like a programmer than learning "tricks" that will get you producing stuff quickly but will not give a solid understanding.

Not looking to become a developer anytime soon. Just want to start learning.

(would you recommend MIT 6.00 and various tutorials instead? I don't have a preference when it comes to what language to use.)

Read this

http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/learn-code/

And the one he links to about Odin imo

How did you get to these tier numbers; I assume it is a measure of wide-spreadedness™?

If so, wouldn't be surprised to see Objective-C being replaced by Swift fairly soon then.

Agree with the sentiment that the domination of less than a handful of languages is over. The diversity of devices "out there in the wild" is too heterogenous for that to be a reasonable expectation anymore.

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If languages become more fragmented, I think their overall implementation and functionality will become more similar over time.

Right now java has the unique advantage of being extraordinarily accessible, portable, and fast (compared to other high level langs like python). I don't see anyone rising to that challenge for a while but stuff happens really quickly these days. I wanna start messing around with .NET but after making this restaurant app I don't even wanna touch a computer again until the fall.

Regarding the question about the dominance of languages, what jmakin states seems to make sense to me. I could be wrong but maintaining code bases could become a complete nightmare (if it already isn't) with more languages being used for more programming tasks.

For instance I wonder about companies that have a well established code base in Objective-C, having invested a lot time and money into developing that code base, that have been faced with the challenges that Swift presents to them. It may not matter that much but I'm fairly certain that companies that have established code bases in Objective-C would have to at least spend some money, maybe a lot of money, in assessing the impact Swift would have on their products going forward.

I mean Swift was developed and implemented for a reason(s) and I think it is a safe bet to assume that is is viewed as a significant improvement to Objective-C. So I would guess that there are a lot of applications that could be written in Swift that would distinguish themselves favorably from those same applications written in Objective-C and yes I understand that Objective-C is callable from Swift but that just seems like a transition path more than anything else. Just some thoughts and certainly could be convinced otherwise.

Then we have the impact on developers. It seems to me that past entry level, most companies are not looking to invest that much in developer learning curves. They pretty much want people to be highly productive in relatively short time periods. It is completely understandable to me why this is the case. So with more specialties that are needed IE more languages, more specialists will be required. Companies can seek all the people they wish to that know C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Objecyive-C, Swift, Python, CSS, Ruby, .NET, Windows, Linux, SQL, Agile, Test Automation, full stack stack, OpenStack, Android, AND iOS to try to cover all their bases. However,practically speaking, they obviously will have to take some risks in determining the future direction of technology and be willing to invest more in developers technological growth. As a developer, in my view, most companies will "pigeon hole" you in some sort of specialty. It happens because they need productive people in various specialties and once they find devs that are productive in a narrowly focused technological area they'll just stick with them because that is the path of least resistance. Hopefully your area of expertise as a dev will stay relevant and/or you can see trends developing and acquire different skills and experience if you perceive your area of expertise is becoming less relevant. If I was an Objective-C expert I would have been spending a lot of time transitioning to Swift for instance. Since I am not an Objective-C expert and I wanted to develop mobile apps for iOS, I would just spend my time learning Swift. Yeah there will be opportunities with Objective-C going forward but I would suspect, fewer and fewer.

Tremendously challenging environment to be a part of in my view.

My friend sent me this closure question that appears on codeschool. Does this look like a really badly worded way of writing the question? I've included the way they wrote it and my (imo) clearer re-write of it.

Theirs :

Mine :

there's a syntax error (typo?) in "theirs" and you messed your code tags up.

all in all, an unsuccessful "lol codeschool" post :P

Any reason you choose to belittle me?

from Eloquent JavaScript Chapter 8 for no other reason than finding it interesting and probably in line with how many coders who have a lot of experience think.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style

for christs sake, it was a friendly joke, hence the emoticon. I wasn't "belittling" you.

Historically, there has always been a small collection of dominant languages and a ton of also-rans. Cream rises to the top. Whether that is good cream or not isn't important.

I think that Go can have the same complaints levied at it that Java does. The argument that Java protects the developer from causing too much damage has been taken to its extreme with Go.

I haven't been around long enough to make a good prediction either way. I do find it fascinating to see mindshare shift, like HN starting to make love to Microsoft lately...

Until someone invents an internet sarcasm detector, I'm going to interpret any comment literally.

You'll get a lot of the Java advantages by running on the JVM. Which is maybe a way of saying that the really important stuff will keep getting pushed down to a layer that can support multiple different programming languages. Using the idea of a programming language just as the syntax that implements ideas.

We're also getting to the point where a lot of the cost of code is in the human factors and not the hardware resource factors. Just meaning that people will choose a language that lets them write the code they need quickly and care less about how optimized it is.

I think that leads to 'mainstream' languages being easier to create and different languages being chosen for different use cases - leading to more fragmentation in programming languages.

I'm writing out half-baked thoughts on my phone, so I'm not sure how well I'm saying what I'm thinking.

I think you're kinda saying the same thing I was trying to get at earlier. I think the underlying structure of languages will become more similar over time and it'll become a matter of syntax and personal preference, so even if there is some fragmentation, overall I think there will be more cohesion. I mean there has to be, right? Adios touched on it. It'd be such a ginormous pain to keep a dev "specialist" for 15 different languages, much less maintain a code base for one of these specializations.

And yea optimization will become less of an issue I think for day to day stuff, because our tools are becoming increasingly powerful and will likely continue to do so.

This is just the perspective of a student, of course, not an industry pro like you guys are.

This is awesome. Thank you.

Word

Java literals - the **** are they and does anyone use them?

Book I'm reading almost makes them sound like casting, but it gives no clear indication of why or when you would use literals, such as 2547483648L for long

It's more like, "Hey, these exist."

I don't think you're understanding what a literal is