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Epic codefest: 7 programming languages in 7 days

Learning a new programming language isn't hard if you understand the fundamentals

By Andrew C. Oliver, InfoWorld, 03/04/13

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We contacted the company or community behind most of the languages and asked whether a mentor could be supplied. (We have enough in-house expertise in Java, JavaScript, and Ruby to do the mentoring ourselves.) We also used community forums, IRC, and mailing lists where possible. Our thinking: A company/organization with enough PR energy to help with the article will be helpful to a paying customer as well. A community that functions on this short a timeline in a helpful manner for a n00b will be reasonably helpful to developers on real projects.

Most developers implemented Granny first in Java and Spring, according to our staff dev guide for a comparable experience. Then after many moons, they implemented it in their assigned "new" language. Aside from the overall guidance above (be "quintessential" and "conventional"), nothing was dictated, like "use higher order functions" or "declare your types." Then each developer was asked some basic questions.

  • What makes this language special?
  • What did you like about it?
  • What frameworks and runtimes did you use?
  • What IDE, editor, and so on did you use?
  • How did you build Granny?
  • Now that you're done, would you find it easier to implement Granny again in Java (or whatever language you are most skilled in) or in the new language we assigned you?
  • What things did you learn that you will take back to your "day job"?
  • Where did you get your questions answered?
  • Would you recommend using this language on a project; if so, where/when?
  • What was the biggest drawback (besides lack of familiarity)?

Following you will find the takeaways from this experiment in programming language transition, as told by each Granny's Addressbook developer.

 Day one: Java Granny
Developer: Mark Pettit, JavaScript developer extraordinaire

Java is obviously a well-established language with a substantial community behind it and abundant documentation.

I used the Spring MVC framework and the Spring Tool Suite IDE. Having no experience setting up back-end frameworks, I relied on the suggestions of my colleagues in making this decision. Jackson with Jersey was another option, but we decided Spring would be easier to work with in the end, albeit more complicated to set up.

As a front-end developer, I've never had the occasion to get familier with REST Services or controllers, let alone try to implement them. Now when my back-end colleagues talk about database connections and POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects), I can nod knowingly instead of letting my eyes gloss over. Fortunately, my programmer colleagues were all very helpful in pointing me in the right directions. Deep Mistry (yes, that's his real name) was especially helpful getting me through the Spring setup.

 Day two: Kotlin Granny
Developer: Lifford Pinto, Java/Spring guy with his head in the clouds

Given that Kotlin is a fairly young language, it wins coolness points. A new language is a programmer's turn-on.

Kotlin is a statically typed language that compiles into JVM bytecode or JavaScript. Brought to you by developers at JetBrains, Kotlin promises to be safer than, compile at least as fast as, and be more concise than Java while remaining simple and expressive.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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