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Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2016 5:23 pm
by Voom
rijackson741 wrote:If you learn VBA then you will find it very easy to write vbscript, which is built in to the Windows OS (it's very useful for the same sort of things you would use Bash scripting for). vbscript is also used as a scripting language in a number of applications. It would also give you a good start for VB.NET. VB.NET is not the same as VBA (VBA is almost identical to VB6, the predecessor to VB.NET), but knowing VBA would give you a good head start.
I will keep this in mind.
rijackson741 wrote:
Voom wrote:what's the number one hacking language?
:shock: That's an interesting question. Why do you want to know? I don't know the answer, or even if there is a a single language that's number one. It probably depends on what you want to hack.
8-) no reason... Actually, I have no interest in hacking anything. lol It's a good trivia question. Maybe one has to be a jack of all trades.

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 1:50 am
by Antison
I'm a Microsoft guy through and through, so I'm going to recommend .NET and C#. VB.NET sucks.
And now that Microsoft has built .NET Core, C# has become available to more developers as it is designed with cross system compatibility in mind.

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:11 am
by rijackson741
Antison wrote: VB.NET sucks.
As a language, all forms of BASIC suck :roll: . It's like the Dracula of languages though. You kill BASIC, and you get "Son of BASIC", and "The Seven wives of BASIC" and... :lol:

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 3:03 pm
by Tomcat
"Advanced BASIC", just for the oxymoron...

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2017 9:46 pm
by twirlimp
Voom wrote:
rijackson741 wrote:If you learn VBA then you will find it very easy to write vbscript, which is built in to the Windows OS (it's very useful for the same sort of things you would use Bash scripting for). vbscript is also used as a scripting language in a number of applications. It would also give you a good start for VB.NET. VB.NET is not the same as VBA (VBA is almost identical to VB6, the predecessor to VB.NET), but knowing VBA would give you a good head start.
I will keep this in mind.
rijackson741 wrote:
Voom wrote:what's the number one hacking language?
:shock: That's an interesting question. Why do you want to know? I don't know the answer, or even if there is a a single language that's number one. It probably depends on what you want to hack.
8-) no reason... Actually, I have no interest in hacking anything. lol It's a good trivia question. Maybe one has to be a jack of all trades.
By definition to hack something you need to understand it in order to abuse it in unintended ways.

So if you're hacking a website you need to know the scripting language used (js, php, etc) and understand the technologies used for the backend (sql, linux, etc). Then you'd need to study potential weaknesses in any and all of these, and even then you might not find anything. So knowing all of them is essential.

To reverse-engineer software, like say to crack Photoshop and use it with a key/license or to make modified Pokemon ROMs, then you'd have to know assembly, and even then there are different kinds of assembly according to your hardware (yup, hardware, Intel vs ARM vs. of course Android).

If you just want to make a virus that activates when someone stupidly clicks on it (e.g. "exam answers.exe") then you can really learn any programming language and compile an executable at the end (even if it's a scripting language like python).

You would also want a language for quick utility programming for simple, short tasks like say processing a list of files or whatever, and these are usually done using a scripting language like bash, python, or (in the good ol' days) perl.

For examples regarding quick scripts in my personal life, there's one that schedules some downloads for when I go to sleep, another that generates a bunch website names based on hot keywords and checks which ones are available, and one that sends emails at 3am so it seems the attached work was hard and I deserve more money, etc...

These aren't examples of hacking scripts, but just give an idea about what I mean by "quick and simple" scripts.

Yeah uhm I had to write a paper about hacking once *cough*. For science.

tl;dr it's not only about "what" you want to hack but also "how" you want to hack, and in many cases you need to learn not a programming language but a framework or a computer system.

Never think about a programming language by itself and always just learn the one you need for a job, so if you're working on Andor's Trail you need to understand Java and Android development, if you're using the Godot Game Engine then you need to know GDscript (or C# soon).

If you *don't* have a project in mind and you're really just in it to learn, then I guess any currently-alive language is fine. *cough* Lisp is divine *cough*

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2017 10:10 pm
by Zukero
*cough* lisp... *cough* Perl...
I'll be back after washing my mouth. Twice.
:lol:

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2017 10:19 pm
by Zukero
More seriously, bash is an awesome productivity tool, that can also do wonders on Windows systems, thanks to tools like cygwin or the awesome Mobaxterm.
For an easy-to-use, general-purpose language, I'd recommend Python these days.
JavaScript can also be considered nowadays, as it's very popular, thus there are a lot of APIs and help available, and what I consider to be its weaknesses generally make the lives of non-coders much easier.

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2017 10:52 pm
by rijackson741
Zukero wrote:For an easy-to-use, general-purpose language, I'd recommend Python these days.
Can't beat completely free! A great introductory book, "A Byte of Python", is also completely free: https://python.swaroopch.com/

Re: Coding in business school

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 5:16 am
by Voom
Very interesting, thanks rijackson.