Video lectures of MIT course 6-00Fall-2008 “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” are available as part of open courseware. One of the topics is “Dynamic Programming” where the knapsack problem is discussed. The programming language used in the course is Python. I wish however that scala or haskell was used instead.
When learning a programming language, won’t it be nice if you can get some instant feedback on your code? Of course, you cannot expect feedback on bugs in your program. But each language has some built in functionality and idioms…
It is a very good idea to learn several programming languages. It makes you a better programmer. But if you want to devote all your energies to becoming a proficient and productive programmer and want to learn one powerful, freely available, high level general-purpose language (not domain specific), what would you choose?
Now Google has come to the rescue by adding another language to the app engine — Java. Now you can have ‘java’ on the client and java on the server. The former is made possible by GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which takes the code you write in Java and translates it into separate targeted javascript code for the 5 of the most common browsers.