If I remember properly I haven’t learnt any new language in last three years. All I had done was learning more libraries in Java, PHP and JavaScript. Partly because I was not interested in learning completely new language and its ecosystem. Also because there was no need. All my bread and butter work was done in Java. I have been using Java for like ten years now. All I needed to do was add more libraries and frameworks. I was in comfortable position. For everything else (my basic web hacking) there was PHP. For fun there was JavaScript. So as you see there was no place for new language.

Slow start
Last year when I went on sabbatical. I also planned to learn something new. But then new language wasn’t on my priority list. So I didn’t :)

Tipping Point
Sale of Sun to Oracle happened. That was the trigger and tipping point. I could somehow never associate myself with Oracle. All of a sudden this cool geek company was part of big business Oracle. Now I wanted a language which has its roots in FOSS and is developer oriented.

Languages considered
I started looking for a new language. The final list of languages were Ruby, Python and Scala.

The one
I was in search of a language

• Rooted in Free and Open Source ideology
• Clean and easy to learn
• Lots of libraries
• OOP support
• Can be used both for system level programming and web development
• Preferably scripting language
• Cross platform
• Community support

Python satisfied everything. So it was Python.

End of Java?
Not really. Though I might use it only on Android platform!

The new beginning
Once I was sure of Python, the rest were easy. On my default platform Linux (Ubuntu), I use Scribes as my editor. On windows I use Notepad++.

Version Confusion
Of course there was a confusion of learning Python 2.7 or 3. But then I was learning and not implementing so chose shiny new Python 3.

Books to begin
Didn’t have to buy any books. Used A Byte of Python
and Dive into Python heavily. Also used Python wiki.

So here I am with a new language, exploring new world. Its been great until now and I expect the same in future.

Reusing the code/frameworks ( either the in public domain or FOSS licensed code) is pretty common. But searching for useful code online is not very easy.The regular search engines like Google or Yahoo are not designed for code searching. Now there are few specialized code search engines which can fetch better result. Here are the top five code search engines

1. Google Code Search
2. Krugle
3. Koders
4. Oreilly Code Search
5. CodeBase
6. CodeFetch

All the above engines allow you to search on Language (like Java, C etc) and license (like GPL, MIT etc). Except for oreilly code search, rest of them search the internet. Oreilly code search contains the code from their books.Which currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code all edited and ready to use. CodeFetch allows you to search all source code examples included in all books on all languages.

But be sure about license terms and conditions before reusing the code.

Reusing the code/frameworks ( either the in public domain or FOSS licensed code) is pretty common. But searching for useful code online is not very easy.The regular search engines like Google or Yahoo are not designed for code searching. Now there are few specialized code search engines which can fetch better result. Here are the top five code search engines

1. Google Code Search
2. Krugle
3. Koders
4. oreilly Code Search
5. CodeBase

All the above engines allow you to search on Language (like Java, C etc) and license (like GPL, MIT etc). Except for oreilly code search, rest of them search the internet.
Oreilly code search contains the code from their books.Which currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code all edited and ready to use.

Create Workspace is a online development environment that facilitates the complete management of your Web-based projects. With a syntax highlighting editor built right in, it provides the ability to edit text, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, Java, Perl, SQL and other types of files directly on a remote server. Finding and managing those files is made easy with a cutting-edge file management utility embedded right in the app. With this utility, users can connect to, and manage the files on an arbitrary number of ftp sites

Workspace is complete online IDE. It gives you all functionalities to work on a web based project from with in a browser. It can connect to multiple online FTP servers. And you can edit those php files with out downloading to your local machine. This will also allow you to browse those FTP servers from behind firewall. The main features include

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If you don’t have an FTP server of your own. Don’t worry every account gets some free space to work on. So go create a workspace.