[Techtalk] Ruby/Perl Tutorials

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

I thought I'd jump in here at the last minute and add a twist to the
conversation as an outsider looking in. I'm not a programmer, so I'll
be coming at this from a different direction.

From all the replies you got, I get the impression that the language
you choose has more to do with what you'd enjoy using and be comfortable with than one language being better than another, so if I
were you, I'd try them all and see which one I take to like a fish to
water, and then go with that one.

That said, I'd like to add that us non-programmers will often look at
the source code of what you programmers did and try to make sense of
it so that we can maybe do a slight modification or learn how you
made the program do what it does.

Regardless of which language you choose, how you program is probably
more important than what language you program in. In that spirit, I'd
like to make a loud shout for one (repeated) word of advice I think
all programmers should listen to:

Comment, comment, comment!

If you add useful comments to the code, you'll not only make what you
write more useful for us non-programmers, but you'll probably save
yourself a lot of relearning when you go back and review something
you wrote to either debug it or figure out how you did it if you
don't remember any more.

Even as a non-programmer I've written my share of Bash scripts and
JavaScript that did nifty little things, only to go back later and
have to relearn the nifty things because I forgot how to do them and
didn't bother to comment properly.

My two cents. (:

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.