[Openstreetmap] Programming Language

[SteveC]

* @ 18/01/06 10:18:49 AM Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
> Ok guys and gals, this is not entirely off topic.
> 
> If I wanted to contribute more or get more out of this project on the
> scripting/programming front, which language would be best to concentrate on.
> We seem to have a broad variety of cross platform languages tied up so far,
> so which one might be best to concentrate on. I tried a little utility tool
> which grades languages according to task and it came out that PHP was the
> one from the bunch, but who am I to judge.
> 
> Any suggestions or pointers would be helpful.

The way I work is to fix on a problem then the language. I'm too lazy to
go learn PHP without a real need.

I'd add SQL to your list if you fancy doing anything server-side. Or
HTML / CSS for page layout. JavaScript...

Specifically in OSM there are quite a few benchmarking tasks that don't
require any particular language, or even speccing out the applet UI
requires some thought. Thanks to the diversity of editors there's a
number of languages there to choose from. As someone else mentioned OSM
uses ruby server-side and the applet is in Java. There is a smidgeon of
PHP that I imagine could be re-written so we don't depend on mod_php.

For what it's worth I'd buy the pickaxe

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974514055/qid=1137586915/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/203-4456799-6632706

and play with ruby, all other things being equal. A number of us on the
mailing list did just that and I was able to refactor all the old java
in to ruby in something like a day and a half which was insane.

have fun,

SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/