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[Siquo]

At work we use PHP, SQL, and Perl mostly, and some Python. Language schmanguage, all of those are easy enough to learn in a week.

[Valid_Dark]

are PHP and SQL really easy enough to learn in a week? 
I've always had an idea for a good PHP/SQL/actionscript mega-project.
maybe after I finish up my current projects I can learn them

[Skyrunner]

I have heard that PHP is a nightmare of inconsistancies and exceptions...

[Shades]

Come to Indianapolis with me and tell all of my prospective employers that. I'm passionate about software development. I'm pretty good at it. I'm willing and eager to learn whatever technologies they may require but I don't have. I'm asking for significantly below the average salary as I'm a fresh college grad.

Being UK based that might be tricky but you should keep looking you don't want to work where someone doesn't value you, and if your passionate enough try checking out some of the startups around there. The other option is conferences, I can't speak for every company but two of the last three I've worked for do a lot of recruiting at the various developer conferences.

are PHP and SQL really easy enough to learn in a week? 
I've always had an idea for a good PHP/SQL/actionscript mega-project.
maybe after I finish up my current projects I can learn them

I'd have said both are easy to learn enough in a week to use, however don't expect to be very good at it until you get more familiar with it. Unless of course you already have half a dozen other languages under your belt,
of course there aren't many languages which you couldn't pick up enough to use in a week if you know a few already.

I'd recommend html5 and javascript over actionscript though, as actionscript is pretty dead ending now. (Although if you already know it then it would make sense)

I have heard that PHP is a nightmare of inconsistancies and exceptions...

A lot of the inconsistencies are because the initial command set matches the C (not ++) apis but the newer stuff is written directly for PHP itself. I wouldn't have said it's much worse that most languages, a little messy but certainly usable and very fast to use. Especially for any website style project because that is the main focus of most of the third party libraries.

[dreadmullet]

I have heard that PHP is a nightmare of inconsistancies and exceptions...

That's pretty much all I hear about PHP.


If you want a language that's easy to learn, try Lua. I decided to learn Lua one day, and 6 hours after I looked up my first tutorial, I had a simple random sentence generator I came up with on my own.

[Siquo]

I have heard that PHP is a nightmare of inconsistancies and exceptions...

That's pretty much all I hear about PHP.

It is, compared to more formal languages where people actually used their brain when they were designed.
Still better than Java, though. It's easy to learn and quick to make stuff in. Mastering it will require you to actually look at the source of the compiler to see how crappy some of the implementations are.

_{Yes, I just said PHP is better than Java. Suck it up}

[Shades]

_{Yes, I just said PHP is better than Java. Suck it up}

Well I'm not certain about better it's hard to judge merits of lanauges, but I know both Java and PHP and I've almost never used Java since leaving university (other than some wrappers for things using hadoop really) but I've used PHP in all bar my second* job.
Generally I find I'm using C++ the most out of languages I use, followed by PHP.

I'd have said there is more people that think they can program in PHP than think they can in Java, although the numbers who are actually any good are probably more similar. I do find the Java programs I look at tend to be both more over engineered and less stable than similar PHP services. (Including the scary multi-threaded PHP service I've seen running)

*or first depending what you count.

[Siquo]

OTOH, I'm getting a segmentation fault in PHP right now. That's fucked up. (Also, the IDE I use for PHP was made in Java, so it does seem to have its uses )

[Skyrunner]

I use C++ just because that's what I've used for the longest time, but I'm not really good at it. :<

I think I should try and learn another language, but I'm not xD

Also, I'm lacking reasonable projects to work on. And by reasonable, I mean not Euler-level >.>

[Shades]

I think I should try and learn another language, but I'm not xD

I'd recommend it. Nothing improved my ability to program more than learning new languages.
There are even some languages I'd consider myself okay at

Also, I'm lacking reasonable projects to work on. And by reasonable, I mean not Euler-level >.>

Go to github and pick something at random?

[Skyrunner]

I thought github was a repository?

[Shades]

I thought github was a repository?

It is, but it's full of open source projects. Plenty of them need new coders to help and it always looks good on your cv for employers to be able to list a few things you have contributed to.
Certainly something we check for here (although it not having anything there wouldn't stop someone being hired, just another way to check how good they are at programming before an interview)

[Araph]

I think I should try and learn another language, but I'm not xD

If you're interested in learning web programming, you could do what I do and constantly remake a simple website. It's actually kind of fun; the feeling of adding new features as you learn how to do different things is always pleasant.

[Squanto]

Squanto has been taken by a fey mood!
Squanto has claimed the Unity Program!
Squanto has begun a mysterious contruction!

Time to do messing around with a program I've never used before.  This is probably something terrible to start at nearly midnight, porabably still stupid to start it at all.

[GalenEvil]

@Squanto: If you need some help doing something in unity send me a pm. I started using it around April-ish and have gotten decent at figuring out how to do things with it.

@Skyrunner: We could still use help probably, I should actually be done with the terrain generator within a week (Finally!) so then we'll be getting back to work on the more "fun" stuff in the project