Although for Ruby (the case he cites) I would argue his "awesome" reason, community, actually springs partially from one of his wrong reasons, namely "readability, expressiveness and an awesome standard library".
Maybe so. I'd love to see a thoughtful article on what creates a great language or framework community. How clean and consistent the language is? Official documentation? Ease of transitioning from other languages? Charisma and marketing savvy from creators? The ability for programmers to use it for fun side projects?
I imagine that one reason that Microsoft-invented languages don't have the culture of Ruby is that you often need expensive licenses to use them, which you won't do unless you're making something Enterprisey (boring). Whereas Ruby and Python are "download and hack away." Maybe that also creates more goodwill from coders.
Microsoft would be foolish to not give away free developer tools. You don't need to purchase anything to use .NET; you can download an ide that comes with a C#, VB.NET, C++/CLI compilers off the bat:
> ... learning Actionscript was like drowning in quicksand. ... noise from complete beginners offering each other tidbits of programming wisdom, such as:
>> make a loop (a while loop I think)
And he says that's a problem. He's right, of course. However, there might also be something very good going on here.
Some history: Back in '78 when I got my first computer, you flipped the power switch, heard a beep, and then you were in a development environment -- a pretty rudimentary one, but a development environment nonetheless. Now fast forward 32 years, and we get the iPad; to program it, you need to pay $100 and sign an NDA (or something like that).
And so some of us are asking: How are newbies supposed to get involved in programming today? It sounds like Actionscript might be at least a partial answer.
How are you meant to use ActionScript to introduce yourself to programming? Your options are to buy or pirate Flash (CS4 is around $699US) or Flex Builder (from $249US).
There's a few open-source tools for ActionScript but I doubt that any of the people posting on those forums are using those tools.
My opinion is that most of the people using ActionScript aren't programmers. People using Flash tend to be designers (or artists, cartoonists, etc.) that need code to get their jobs done.
"noise from complete beginners offering each other tidbits of programming wisdom"
This is a problem that plagues any language with both age and an active online community.
ActionScript has been around for a decade and massive communities have been built around it with the users dominated by people who are inexperienced, learning, and overly-confident about their abilities. The same can be found for HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, Java, C#, etc.
If RoR remains relevant and used for long enough by enough people, it too will enjoy the same fate.
It isn't simply a factor of age and community size. A few years ago I was picking up both python and php for the first time for a couple of projects and as such spent a lot of time on both comp.lang.python and comp.lang.php (I said it was a few years ago). Both groups where roughly equally active, and both languages roughly equally old. Yet those two groups couldn't have been more different. In the python group people where, on the whole, polite, asked advanced question and got detailed answers. In the php group people where often insulting, the questions where almost always trivial and still the answers a best shallow and at worst completely wrong.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 26.4 ms ] threadAlthough for Ruby (the case he cites) I would argue his "awesome" reason, community, actually springs partially from one of his wrong reasons, namely "readability, expressiveness and an awesome standard library".
I imagine that one reason that Microsoft-invented languages don't have the culture of Ruby is that you often need expensive licenses to use them, which you won't do unless you're making something Enterprisey (boring). Whereas Ruby and Python are "download and hack away." Maybe that also creates more goodwill from coders.
http://www.microsoft.com/exPress/
And besides that, you can get compilers for F#, J#, IronPython, IronRuby, etc.
>> make a loop (a while loop I think)
And he says that's a problem. He's right, of course. However, there might also be something very good going on here.
Some history: Back in '78 when I got my first computer, you flipped the power switch, heard a beep, and then you were in a development environment -- a pretty rudimentary one, but a development environment nonetheless. Now fast forward 32 years, and we get the iPad; to program it, you need to pay $100 and sign an NDA (or something like that).
And so some of us are asking: How are newbies supposed to get involved in programming today? It sounds like Actionscript might be at least a partial answer.
There's a few open-source tools for ActionScript but I doubt that any of the people posting on those forums are using those tools.
My opinion is that most of the people using ActionScript aren't programmers. People using Flash tend to be designers (or artists, cartoonists, etc.) that need code to get their jobs done.
This is a problem that plagues any language with both age and an active online community.
ActionScript has been around for a decade and massive communities have been built around it with the users dominated by people who are inexperienced, learning, and overly-confident about their abilities. The same can be found for HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, Java, C#, etc.
If RoR remains relevant and used for long enough by enough people, it too will enjoy the same fate.