I was having a chat with our younger son a few days ago, and as part of his schoolwork this year involves Visual Basic, I decided to show him its relative popularity among programming languages on a site that (among other things) measures the month-to-month changes in programming language popularity called Tiobe.com. It's actually one of my favorite sites for tech stuff, along with Tech Republic, Dream In Code, Major Geeks, and of course Canonical. Tech Republic is a cool site with all things I.T., Dream In Code is a massive coders' forum, Major Geeks is a great source for downloadable software (free, shareware and $$$), and Canonical is home to the Linux Ubuntu distro.
Tiobe, though, is pretty interesting: (Visual) Basic was ranked 7th in worldwide popularity, sandwiched between PHP and Python. "Heck," I said (yup, I really said "Heck"), "there's even languages in the Top 20 that I've never heard of, like #20- Lua." At the mention of Lua, he became rather animated, and said that he knew of Lua, and how it was extensively used in the popular (game) Team Fortress mod, Gary's Mod.
Lua is open source and claims to use the very liberal MIT license rather than the more well-known (well, to me, at least) Gnu General Public License. It is free to download and use. As for learning Lua, the site claims that the language is both a lightweight and robust scripting language; v5.2 is the current distro- there are books available to purchase covering 5.1 and 5.2. However, the Lua 5.0 e-book is available at no cost online.
Back to Tiobe, though- HTML is conspicuously absent from their rankings, and they explain this on the site: HTML- and SQL- are not "Turing Complete", but T-SQL is. I'm fine with Tiobe (and other sites saying this), and as I've never taken a computer science course in my life, I'm going to assume this to be true. As for Turing, well, the fellow has not been with us for some time, but he has a website! Our son had just finished reading a book about Turing, so he had a vague familiarity with the concept.
I think that's pretty much all for now from here. Nothing to report on database progress, but out of necessity I built a really nice investment calculator in Excel- I wish I had a broker's license, because this calculator was instrumental in selling a few hundred shares of a particular equity!
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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