You mean duct taped languages? Sorry for being pedantic.

Yes, I did hear many good things about Java as a programming language, right from my grad days. C++ is not a pure oops, java is a pure oops, and some other cool stuff.

As I understand, going to Java will be "grammatically" approach but Django and RoR will be a quick and dirty way. Am I right?

No, I meant duck-typed. A lot of languages popular with the HN ooh-new-shiney-language-of-the-month crowd use duck typing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing

Also, Java is not pure OOP in any real sense of the word. It still has primitives, and plenty of other reasons.

All I was saying that if you're accustomed to statically-typed languages with pointer/reference passing semantics and limited FP usage, the manner in which you think is likely to mesh better with Java. And in that sense, you'd probably be more productive out of the gate with it than with Ruby.

Or maybe not - learning about servlet containers and how Wicket overlays it, and Wicket's own component-oriented stateful approach could be fairly steep.

This is not an easy question to answer, and is almost entirely dependent on your experience and disposition.

I am stunned. Is a simple CMS a basic project for PHP? I must admit I dont know much about it, but then Php looks incredibly powerful

PHP is powerful, it just isn't the new tool on the block, so it isn't as popular. Like what has happened to Perl.

Thanks merijnv,thanks for the inputs.

To be frank,I never did start with PHP, but yes I did flirt with Perl. I know a bit of Perl,(though embarrassed to admit,I lost my patience with Perl midway)

As for Ruby, I strangely had the impression, that I can't attempt at it, without knowing PHP and others.

So anyway for RoR or Django, do I need to learn Ruby and Python respctively to start over, or can I jump straight to it. I have coded in C# and did some personal db work in MySQL . If that helps.

In my opinion it should be perfectly possible for someone with C# and C experience to start learning Python and Django at the same time (you can go over the tutorial at docs.python.org. in a handful of hours tops and that should be plenty to start), I personally have no experience with Rails, but I imagine the same applies.

(Also, the #python IRC channel on FreeNode.net is a truly excellent community!)

Come on, geeks! You are my last resort.

You need to help me out! :)

Thanks hs, but can you please talk about it a little more? Do you mean to say the entire graphing engine is matplotlib and it has open apis? I dont know, but I dont think so, Mathworks will allow that.

Moreover, any library as such to be used in languages like C/C++/Perl?

here - http://justfuckinggoogleit.com

Thanks SwellJoes, Thanks gtani

But have you noticed that Perl doesnt really have a great charting/graphing or plotting library? So, I am a bit unsure of developing visualisation tools.

And secondly I would like to ask, will it really have a computation edge while handling MBs of data? Or rather put in this way can it scale?

Based on my experience, I think the important concerns: database drivers, bridges to linear algebra and stat/prob libs i mentioned, C extensions and java libraries.

I work in python and ruby where appropriate, and forgot all the perl i know, except when I maintain other people's code.

The database driver issue, is moot, all three languages have solid packages for mysql, SQLite or any non-obscure RDBMS and probably hook into couchDB, or mnesia, or any of the non-SQL databases.

The hooks to MATLAB, R, gsl or octave or linpack or whatever, not hard to google. Worst case, you pipe / tee flat files between apps (I'm assuming you're using linux or FreeBSD or solaris).

C extensions: Pretty straightforward in python or ruby. In face, ruby-inline, pyrex/cython make it about as straightforward as could be, assuming you know to look for memory leaks and clean up after yourself. And Jruby is produciton-ready, you can be pretty confident you can hook into whatever java libs you need.

I suggest you look at what Jane St Capital is writing about OCaml analytics.

Hey Vinz giving it a look... I am actually a hardware/electronics guy. I am working on these stuff day in and day out, so just thought up to pry open the latest gadgets to see whats going inside.And thanks for the reco

@ Xirium

Yeah how stuff works is good, but I would like to have a really product differentiating 'under-the-hood' peak. I want to know the h/w difference between Broadcoms Router and Linksys or something to that effect[just for an example]. But HSW will only tell how generic routers work...

"Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman" [absolutely rockstar of a autobiography]

"Every Second Counts" Lance Armstrong [poignant]

"A beautiful mind" John Forbes Nash [moving, and heart wrenching]

My personal favourite: "Icon" Steve Jobs