Best Beginner Programming Language?

[Deleted User]

Mr_Toad wrote: »

I was at my local hospital recently for some tests and despite the money, systems and hard work there are still people pushing huge trolleys of paperwork about.

It's enough to make you weep and is it any wonder that some of the companies involved walked away.

My firm is actually involved trying to digitise those 'huge trolleys of paperwork'. It's actually much harder than you might think. We had to send someone to a trust for 6 months to discover all the different document formats and templates they'd used; whilst working in a department that will see job cuts due to the work we were doing.

I'd also agree that the government/NHS is an 'entertaining' client to work for. I've worked on many systems that I felt were doomed to never 'go-live' because they'd be badly conceived.

Mr_Toad

ringo_24601 wrote: »

My firm is actually involved trying to digitise those 'huge trolleys of paperwork'. It's actually much harder than you might think. We had to send someone to a trust for 6 months to discover all the different document formats and templates they'd used; whilst working in a department that will see job cuts due to the work we were doing.

I'd also agree that the government/NHS is an 'entertaining' client to work for. I've worked on many systems that I felt were doomed to never 'go-live' because they'd be badly conceived.

I feel your pain.

A couple of the things I used to hear regularly was with paper you can fill it anywhere, you don't have to find and sit at a computer and that writing is quicker than typing.

downinja

Whilst not my first coding language (did some VB in my younger years, then HTML, then SQL), I have over the last few weeks been tackling Swift.

Have to say I really like it, but honestly instead of looking for a language, I would look at what you want to do with it, then work towards that whilst learning a language, I find it motivates me more.

[Deleted User]

Mr_Toad wrote: »

I feel your pain.

A couple of the things I used to hear regularly was with paper you can fill it anywhere, you don't have to find and sit at a computer and that writing is quicker than typing.

You'd be astounded at the reduction in medical errors that can come about by doing things on the computer rather than on paper though...

I've been in the 'health IT' biz for 10 years now; it's shocking how slow things change. I've been anticipating personal 'facebook' like views for patients and doctors for ages, but I still think it's a way off.

I'm crossing my fingers we've got our first genomics project coming up. Pharmacogenomics is the future of medicine, but it's a long way off at the moment.

In the health IT world, we use EVERYTHING, C#, VBA, Mumps (Cache), SQL, JavaScript, XSLT, Java plus some big firms invent their own languages. There's also a variety of medical interchange data formats to be learning.

InsideInsurance

AndyPix wrote: »

What a strange statement..
If you are looking on a C site, the examples will be in C
If you look on a VB site, the examples will be in VB.

Thousands upon thousands of both

But if you look at a .Net site or for example code for certain existing solutions that you can expand by creating your own code (eg the CMS DotNetNuke) then these are more commonly in C#

Now, it isnt overly hard to use an online converter to go from C# to VB but they dont always get it right and the more complex the code the more problems you get.

Whilst in theory someone learning doesnt do complex code I am sure anyone who has passed the initial stage of programming suddenly realises something that seems straightforward enough to do actually is very complex programatically