The best language for non-programmer technicians to learn

Question

I have a colleague who processes technical support, and its role includes many conversions of ASCII files from one format to another and sometimes report them. Formats, as a rule, are mostly plain text with a small amount of XML. She regularly forces me to write small scripts for these conversions, as well as batch files to repeat the operation for collections of files in different places. She currently uses Crystal Reports to do most of this, but it's a bit of a dog.

Can anyone recommend a language or an alternative tool so that she can learn to be more confident about this role. At the beginning, it should be very easy to master at the initial level, manipulate text files well and work in a Windows environment. Ideally, it would also be freely available so that it could pass on its scripts to its end users.

Answer 1

A good first choice for a new programmer is probably Ruby .

I mention this not only because it seems to be a very simple language to learn (I have earned the basics in a few days, but not really trying), but also because it has very high quality educational material (more, than I've seen for any language for a long time - if you haven’t seen it, you really need to check out the Why Poignant Guide .)

You can let her try Ruby on her own to see how she likes it.

If she doesn't like Ruby, then Python will probably be my next choice, but the documentation may be a bit dry in places. I definitely adhere to a dynamic scripting language, although they are very fast and easy to learn, and you can "earn" with a minimum of fuss.

I would definitely go first with Ruby, simply because the training material is incredibly high quality.

Answer 2

I would recommend Python for such tasks.

It is syntactically clear, and it does an excellent job of reading, and manages test files well. It also provides excellent XML support.

Answer 3

JOKE:. You could try to teach her regular expressions;)

Answer 4

You answered your own question - scripting.

Why not teach her to write the scripts that you wrote for her? I assume you are doing WSH scripts, which is a pretty low barrier to entry for non-programmers; They do not require a large number of infrastructure and SDK installations, in fact, they do not need large Gigabyte-IDEs. Just a decent text editor and WSH help file, along with some tutorials to get you started.

I started my career as a system / network administrator, not a programmer / developer. And studying scripts to automate my tasks was exactly what made me remember my first love and switch lines to software development.

Answer 5

Perl looks like one natural fit, Python sounds like a good option. I don’t know which language you usually use, but if it is based on .NET, why not go with Boo ? Thus, tou gets the Python syntax and can offer help by acting as a reference to the framework.

Answer 6

AutoIT is free and easy to learn. The help documents that come with it are extensive.

Answer 7

switch (Get-ComputingCulture) { 'unix/java' { python || ruby} 'Windows 2000/VB6' { vbscript } 'Windows XP/.Net' { PowerShell } } 

Answer 8

VB.Net using Visual Studio Express and it gives a good IDE

Answer 9

I agree that python would be good at this task, I'm just not sure that someone who has no programming experience can self-learn at the level you need in a short time.

Expect to make a lot of support during this training period.

Answer 10

Windows Powershell - it is freely available, runs on Windows, is very powerful and effectively gives you the power of the .NET platform without having to install Visual Studio and go through the complexity of compilation, etc. The only drawback is that it may be a bit of the learning curve.

Answer 11

I would also recommend Python as it has clear and easy-to-learn syntax, great libraries, and decent documentation.

I do all my text processing tasks in Python and can't be happier (although I'm a programmer ...)

Answer 12

First, give her a text editor with the search and replace regular expressions, for example Notepad ++ or SciTE. Once your colleague understands the concept, you can present it in the appropriate scripting language (I agree with Luke that Powershell would be a good option).

Answer 13

With XML literals and “lightweight” syntax, I would suggest Visual Basic.NET (targeting .NET 3.5).

Answer 14

If you are only for Windows, then vbscript, I taught it to several developers, they are quite easy to pick up. If you're a blended store, then perl is likely to be most useful.

Answer 15

You can try an alternative to regular expression training using the powerful regular expression features editpad

This is very fast, and many of the tasks you perform to perform conversions / replacements may be possible with this.

Answer 16

In the end, any scripting environment must do its job. It all depends on what your environment is. I personally visited Python, Perl, or Ruby, as they all have good support for regular expressions, different encodings, and XML (although I'm not sure about Ruby in the Unicode department).

For simple file conversion negotiations, they all also need to be more or less en-par when it comes to learning them.