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This was an inspiring article for someone like me with an business degree and aspirations for creating a startup but without the programming ability. Would sta

This was an inspiring article for someone like me with an business degree and aspirations for creating a startup but without the programming ability. Would starting out learning a language like python be recommended as a good one in general for putting an idea into action? After some iteration and traction, I'd bring on a capable coding partner to do it right. FWIW, I've also heard that Python is useful for making scripts for automating tasks or improving productivity.

aero142 17y ago
Yes. Python is a great learning language, and useful for many things long term.
jedc 17y ago
Python is great. O'Reilly is coming out with a book soon, "Head First Programming" that teaches programming, specifically using Python. It could be a great first start for you.
davidw 17y ago
Python and Ruby are great first languages; they'll let you do all kinds of things, from quick scripts to web programming to GUI's. There are some things for which they're not ideal, but they're still probably 'good enough'.
notauser 17y ago
This route (learn to code it yourself) is the one I took. I now have a pretty technically credible* product with actual paying customers and everything. The language I learned first was JavaScript because it's ubiquitous. There are a million tutorials to get you going. A lot of JS tutorials suck, which is a disadvantage, but it gives you a pretty big confidence boost to be able to read a tutorial and think "that's moronic, I know 6 other ways to do that which will work better". Python tutorials tend to break out advanced/elegant/clever stuff really quickly which has the opposite effect. I wrote a couple of little apps, then a prototype, then it felt like I knew enough to really get going. I then picked up Python (actually Django) because the relative maturity of server side JS platforms isn't as good. Switching languages was easy. The total time to get to that point was about 4 months (whilst working full time), but I had the advantage of living in a place where everything shut when it went dark at 7pm. *Except for the bugs, and the scaling issues, and the bad design decisions I made early on. As far as I can tell I'm not the only person to have problems like this though, and refactoring is a good way to spend a plane ride.

aero142 17y ago

Yes. Python is a great learning language, and useful for many things long term.

jedc 17y ago

Python is great. O'Reilly is coming out with a book soon, "Head First Programming" that teaches programming, specifically using Python. It could be a great first start for you.

davidw 17y ago

Python and Ruby are great first languages; they'll let you do all kinds of things, from quick scripts to web programming to GUI's. There are some things for which they're not ideal, but they're still probably 'good enough'.

notauser 17y ago

This route (learn to code it yourself) is the one I took. I now have a pretty technically credible* product with actual paying customers and everything. The language I learned first was JavaScript because it's ubiquitous. There are a million tutorials to get you going. A lot of JS tutorials suck, which is a disadvantage, but it gives you a pretty big confidence boost to be able to read a tutorial and think "that's moronic, I know 6 other ways to do that which will work better". Python tutorials tend to break out advanced/elegant/clever stuff really quickly which has the opposite effect. I wrote a couple of little apps, then a prototype, then it felt like I knew enough to really get going. I then picked up Python (actually Django) because the relative maturity of server side JS platforms isn't as good. Switching languages was easy. The total time to get to that point was about 4 months (whilst working full time), but I had the advantage of living in a place where everything shut when it went dark at 7pm. *Except for the bugs, and the scaling issues, and the bad design decisions I made early on. As far as I can tell I'm not the only person to have problems like this though, and refactoring is a good way to spend a plane ride.