3 Most Important Languages?

**phanie12.geo** · May 15, 2001, 17:47

I wanted to get everyone's opinion on what the 3 most important web development languages would be for a web developer to know. If you had to choose just three....maybe four, what would you say? Do you think XHTML will replace HTML. Do you think PHP is extremely important? Cold fusion?

**Nicky** · May 15, 2001, 17:54

I would go for

XHTML (will replace HTML and it similar therefore easy to learn)
XML
PHP

**phanie12.geo** · May 15, 2001, 18:00

Hi Nicky,

You mentioned XML, which makes it necessary to know SGML, correct? So would you consider that an important one too?

**Nicky** · May 15, 2001, 18:10

No, even though XML is a child language of SGML I would not recommend learning SGML. You could learn XML from scratch without knowing SGML which is HUUUUUUUUGE!

**sowen** · May 15, 2001, 18:24

XML is probably going to be the 'next big thing' so put it towards the top of your list. Now XML isn't that hard on it's own, problem is from the design point of view is turning XML into somthing pretty. Options at the moment are xslt and sax until browsers start to become fully xml/xsl aware.

CSS will be an integral part of the move towards xml so that should be in your list too.

**Nicky** · May 15, 2001, 18:33

Sowen - go to bed - it's 2.30am!

**qslack** · May 15, 2001, 18:50

I'd say:
HTML
Perl
SQL

I really think that XML will be just another piece of vaporware. I'm not believing the hype...I don't think it's going to be everywhere in just a year or so. It's good for content syndication but I don't think that XSLT and all that stuff will catch on.

Perl, IMO, is a good all-around language. You can do web, application, and system programming with it, and it lends syntax elements from several other languages. HTML is a must.

SQL is important because it is the de-facto standard for communicating with databases. You need it no matter what you do as long as you're working with databases.

**Nicky** · May 15, 2001, 18:53

HTML is not a must because there will be no further versions of HTML specified, instead it will be replaced with XHTML.

Even though I wouldn't place Perl in the top 3, I certainly value it as a language, although I find it is not as user friendly as other "web" languages.

**qslack** · May 15, 2001, 18:57

I guess to me, XHTML and HTML are the same thing, except for a few arbitrary guidelines...

Originally posted by Nicky
Even though I wouldn't place Perl in the top 3, I certainly value it as a language, although I find it is not as user friendly as other "web" languages.

That's a topic (and/or flamewar) for another thread

**Nicky** · May 15, 2001, 19:00

You're on!

But is it 3am and I REALLY muct go to bed now.

**TheOriginalH** · May 16, 2001, 08:41

Nobodys mentioned ikkle ole JavaScript??? Or should learning that be considered "a bit like Latin", and everyone just nick old ones from now on?

H

**sbdi** · May 16, 2001, 09:00

Javascript isnt that important. If you learn the basics then its great anything advanced you can just download

So no real work is needed to do it, just like funny html

**cckrocks** · May 16, 2001, 17:47

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. SQL
4. some type of dynamic language

Almost any dynamic language can do everything that all the other dynamic languages can do, it's just which one you feel most comfortable with. Don't let anyone tell you that one is much better than the other, because it's untrue. There are NEXT TO NO things that can't be accomplished with any language.

**phanie12.geo** · May 16, 2001, 18:04

So from these posts, I am getting that HTMl is a given and SQL and CSS are probably the next important ones. I am taking this informal poll to figure out which languages I should try learning next. Thanks so much for your input!

Stephanie

**-TheDarkEye-** · May 16, 2001, 19:00

I really think that XML will be just another piece of vaporware. I'm not believing the hype...I don't think it's going to be everywhere in just a year or so. It's good for content syndication but I don't think that XSLT and all that stuff will catch on.

you must be nuts. this is where the web is going; separation of content from layout. i think thats huge and it is the way the web should be. you might not be used to this paradigm but that doesnt mean it wont catch on. it is hard to say what parts of the technology will be developed and used by the public in the future but i am very sure that xml will be used commonly after the support by browsers is there.

xml may be hyped a lot but for good reason. it rocks.

my three picks are:

xml along with css and xsl
php or any other server-side language...pick your fav. this would also include sql.

**Robo** · May 17, 2001, 03:55

Hey, Microsoft is behind XML, and over 90% of computers has Microsoft software in it, plus Slashdot uses XML, pretty hard not to make it successful.

**Michel V** · May 18, 2001, 04:57

I remember a company in Redmond was also behind some ancient weblanguage, that was featured as tutorials almost everywhere and that has proven to be terribly bad... Anyone remember VBScript ?

Also, they're not the only company behind XML, although of course they'll make the most out of their participation in defining it, like "How are you webmasters ? all your XML are belong to us. You are on the way to proprietary XML. You have no chance to be standards compliant make your time."

Back to the poll, I'd list the usual three there: XHTML+CSS, SQL, and a server-side language.

**qslack** · May 18, 2001, 05:39

Originally posted by Robo
plus Slashdot uses XML, pretty hard not to make it successful.

Slashdot uses XML for their RSS news feeds, that's all.

**scrubz** · May 18, 2001, 06:14

Originally posted by sbdi
Javascript isnt that important. If you learn the basics then its great anything advanced you can just download So no real work is needed to do it, just like funny html

I couldn't disagree more. For me, JavaScript IS important for the development I do, and there is no way a person could survive on some of the projects I've done by just being a "cut and paste monkey." If you had to write and implement a rather complex JavaScript solution in a web page, you'd be much better off knowing what you're doing and writing it yourself, rather than borrowing someone else's code and trying to make it work. That's not to say I don't borrow code, but I can't rely on someone elses code for my work. </rant>

That said, the most important languages:

1) HTML
2) JavaScript
3) A scripting language (ASP for me)
4) SQL

**honging** · May 18, 2001, 10:29

xhtml/xml, css, php, SQL

With those, you can tackle most all web projects!

**freakysid** · May 18, 2001, 11:42

ching, ching....

OK - is this thing turned on???

1) Obviously (X)HTML/CSS is a given. Your browser is going to look pretty blank without HTML at a mimumum. So really, there is no reason to be discussing it. CSS is just an extension to HTML - its hardly a language.

2) Java or C++. Yep, learn the general principles of object oriented programming by learning one of these general purpose programming languages. Sure, this might be a bit daunting, but it is well worth the pain. IMHO it is far more important to learn how to program than to learn a programming language

Java is probably the easier of the two. Two and a half years ago I could not look at a simple piece of javascript without being confused by the curly braces

However, after having studied Java and C++ I can now pretty much pick up any language after a little learning; eg, VB, php, JavaScript. For example, once you have a good theoretical grasp on how to program, and how to design programming solutions/algorithms, then implimenting some JavaScript is more a matter of looking up the the documentation on DOM to find out which object has the relevent method or property you need to access.

3) Relational Databases are going to continue to be the dominant method of modelling and storing data. IMHO, data is the most important information asset when talking about business information system (such as e-commerce). A good theoritic understanding of entity-relationship data modelling and data normalisation is crucial to designing robust relational databases. On top of that comes a good understanding of SQL. It is too undervalued as a powerful data manipulation language.

XML has a very bright future. The only "platform" it rellies on is ASCII which is universal. Thus XML is completly platform independent and perfect for transfering data accross hetrogenous distributed systems (ie, the internet

). XML will become even more important in systems where data must be communicated accross paradigms such as in relational-to-object mapping. With that said - I will admit I've only read about XML at this stage. Its on the list of things to learn

To me the first three areas I raised above are more important.

**praveen** · May 18, 2001, 12:55

Yaa i also think xml is the future of the web. You can practically do any thing that u can do with html in the xsl file at the same time you are getting a partial data base support with xml.

Any body know about coldfusion? what is that?

**basjen** · May 18, 2001, 13:48

HTML, CSS, JSP

**freakysid** · May 18, 2001, 15:53

Cold Fusion is a server side scripting language, as are ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Servler Pages) and PHP (originally known as Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter, know called the Hypertext Pre-processor). Cold Fusion be used to perform tasks on the server such as take form data submitted by a user and insert it into a database, or retieve data from a database and embed it into HTML.

Sitepoint member Chris Beasley has written a three part article on Cold Fusion on webmasterbase.com

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php/310
http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php/311
http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php/318

**mh8759** · May 18, 2001, 16:09

some things have to be said here..many of you are talking about xml, css, html etc.
These are not languages, maybe html, but certainly not css and xml..the first one is some sort of description markup and the second one also, although it's abbreviation means extensible markup language.

And Shin Ma, you said VBScript is terribly bad. I can't agree with that. It is the main language of ASP and now that ASP.NET is coming it still remains one of the supported languages(VBScript, JScript, C#). Millions of programmers use Visual Basic and many more millions use VBScript.

My favorite ones and in my opinion most important are
PHP(which is very good scripting language derived from C++), ASP with VBScript(ASP.NET in near future) and C#, which is eventually probably going to replace both VBScript and JScript when writing ASP.NET pages. Ohh and JSP is quite good also, but has little support from hosting companies.

That's just my 2 cents
Marko

User Tag List

Thread: 3 Most Important Languages?

Thread Tools

Display

Microsoft's mighty ideas for the Web

yes XML

Bookmarks

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions