what is the latest and the most lucrative programming language in vogue in the Nigerian IT world of today, reply and give your reasons.

Python. Reason: I like it. | Java. Reason: so many people like it | PHP. Reason: so many people use it.

dan_onyeka:

what is the latest and the most lucrative programming language in vogue in the Nigerian IT world of today, reply and give your reasons.

I don't understand what lucrative means here. Do you mean efficient ?. If that's what you mean then I think it depends on the programmer as much as it depends on the programming language.

If you mean money earner then I think you will hardly have the patience to learn programming to the point of earning money with it. All those great programmers you hear about in the IT world learned programming because of the passion they have for it and later used their skills to earn money and not the other way round.

Just my views, just my views.

If I understand where dan is coming from, then I think the answer is PHP - it is open source and free. Also, it is easy to learn and is actually very powerful if you know how to use it. Not to mention, thanks to the multitude of hosts out there, cPanel and phpmyadmin (is that the right spelling? ) are also very user-friendly.

Finally, since the world is going in the direction of web apps, in my opinion, in addition to learning HTML et al, combining these scripts with PHP makes for pretty nifty web apps/sites. It is very easy to go download an e-book or two on PHP, learn it and put up a website, no matter how sloppy it looks.

At least that's my 2 cent's worth

I agree with dan_onyeka that there is nothing like the latest and most lucrative programming language. Supposing there is one, say assembly language, are you sure you will like it? You need to develop interest in one that you like, master it and do something productive with it. The sky is big enough to contain all the languages and the programmers.

However, a fair way of knowing how popular or lucrative a language is to search the job net. This also depends on where you are searching. Some analysts use http://dice.com. You can also read more on career magazines or websites. See this link on 10 Programming Languages You Should Learn Right Now [url]http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2016415,00.asp[/url]. You will learn a lot my reading all the comments too. On dice.com, you can learn how popular a language is or how employers are demanding for it. According to eweek, "The database skills most requested of IT hires were Oracle and SQL in March, and the most in-demand programming languages were J2EE/Java and C/C++. You can conduct your own independent search" - [url=http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2113747,00.asp]http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2113747,00.asp [/url]

But coming home to Nigeria, you will earn a living as a web developer quickly with PHP and since most Nigeria corporate sites tend to use ASP, you might be luck with that.

In conclusion, here is a excerpt from my email archive.

Aim Enterprise
The rule is that whichever field you find yourself, you should aim to compete globally. The dream of most professionals is to work in the top companies in the world, Fortune 500, Global 1000, etc. Not everyone would make it there eventually but for those who work at it diligently they go a very long way. It is in the enterprise you will usually find the experience and the reward. These organizations are run differently from the small companies you see by the road side. In Nigeria, banks, big telecos, oil companies etc would fit in the definition of enterprise though in reality some of these companies would be classified as SMB (small and medium businesses) in developed countries. Yes, when you look at the revenues, number of staff and number of locations they operate from. These are businesses that are typically called mission critical. Can you imagine how you feel when you walk in to a bank and you can not make a transaction because the system is down or how do you feel when you cannot make a urgent or important call with your mobile phone because the operator is having a problem? Further more, imaging what sheer waste of energy and millions of dollars to drill a dry oil well. These companies would rather do it well than do it cheap or experiment because the cost of failure is huge.

On PHP, you will hit the road faster but it wont take you to the enterprise. The world of web application development is largely divided between Java and the .Net platforms. I don't want to start a flame war by going on merit or demerit of them.

Problem with PHP
The requirements in the enterprise is different. Downtime is usually quantify in naira or dollars. Do a personal research and find how many banks in Nigeria or even abroad use PHP. The language does not scale, lacks OOP (until version 5) and not distributed. There are work around but they are not easy. Big companies like yahoo and others use it but it's not something popular among Fortune 500 companies. You find it mostly in SMB. Look at it again, when you are in the enterprise, you will not likely be talking to a MySQL database but something like Oracle, DB2 and Sybase or its sister MS SQL mostly on Unix servers only with the exception of MS SQL. You will need to take care of things like transaction, stored procedure etc. When I had that challenge I switched to Java and the reward was huge. That's perhaps where Java is most popular at least JEE (J2EE). Again it all depends on where you are going.

Conclusion
In conclusion i want to say nothing good or that is of premium value comes cheap. I have a friend who is a professional PHP programmer. His company would like to start using .Net or precisely ASP.Net. I have never used it but know a few things about it. Well, one of them is that since .Net languages borrow hugely from Java, they equally inherit the complexity of Java. The last time I asked him, how far. He had almost given up or at least suspended it. You can know the syntax but developing and deploying a real world application is quite a different thing. Then I asked him to compare it with how long it took him to learn and start developing real world application with PHP. Of course a lot shorter. Do the sums yourself.

Your replies and reasons are all interesting but I must say that some of our reasons/analyses are anchored on bias