macOS a learning project

[stealthsniper96]

well so ive been wanting to learn how to program for a while, and i been thinking about some kind of simple sounding app that i might be able to make to get started. keep in mind that i'd be starting from scratch, learning my first language and so-on. my program idea is like virtual flashcards. so like if your studying for school of w/e you can make flashcards on the computer and dont have to worry about writing them out, andthen have them like rotate on screen and what not. so my question is what language should i learn and use to create something like that?

 

[overanalyzer]

Sounds like you could use hypercard...if it were a decade ago.

I've programmed in BASIC, Pascal, C++, Perl, VBA, VBScript, PHP and C# over the last 16 years or so. I'm 95% web oriented now - don't do much desktop development. So I guess from my perspective, the first question is if you want to develop for the web or desktop in the long run, and if you're thinking Mac apps mostly/only or possibly working cross-platform.

Personally, I'm pretty biased, so I'd suggest thinking about developing for the web.

 

[stealthsniper96]

well i guess cross platform would be nice, seeing as how if i stay mac only i would be getting about 2% of the whole computer market.

 

[overanalyzer]

Ouch 🙂 I think it's more like 5-6% now.

There are some options for cross-platform desktop apps, though I'm not a big expert on that. The barrier to entry on web development is pretty low, since XHTML and CSS are so common knowledge these days, and something like your flashcard idea could be done with minimal backend programming. You'd need a database of some sort though. As a start, you could develop locally on your Mac using the built-in Apache, and then install MySQL (be careful about securing that) for a database to fool around with. I'm not a big PHP fan, but it might be a relatively simple language for you to start with, and would be easy to get running on your Mac locally to play with. Personally, I'd go with Java, but depending on your learning style you'll either find Java easier for being well organized as an object oriented language, or more complicated because there are more rules working with OO languages....

Do you have any past exposure to programming? Or to web development? I've self-taught myself almost everything I know, but I've been toying with programming my whole life, and I do it for a living now. So I'm used to sitting down with something brand new and figuring it out, but I have the benefit of doing that a lot over time. The true first time is definitely harder when you have no basis for comparison....