Hi, I'm a complete useless lurker who do not know anything about programming, and I want to program an XMPP client :D. I have absolutely 0 competence, but I'd like to know if there is a language preferable to make such things, and if there is a place where I can start to learn. I tried with some basic tutorials and general lessons about programming, but without a clear goal I got bored and stopped after a little while. Thanks in advance for every advice/insult!

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[–] electrodynamica@mander.xyz 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

First decide on a platform, then language. Do you want to make a windows gui client? Apple? Mobile? Web? *nix console?

GUI is the hardest part of programming on pretty much any platform, especially compared to how simple XMPP is.

Javascript/web is probably easiest for a beginner...

[–] Jama@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You're right, I'd like to develop for android, and I prefer to learn something else than JavaScript. Thanks for the answer and the info of course :)

[–] southerntofu@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In Android land Java is the go-to language. But there's already an abundance of XMPP clients on Android. Do you have ideas for specific features you would like to develop in particular that you could not find in an existing client?

[–] Jama@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I will think about java, thanks :). Clients I used (conversations and forks) usually lacks a lot of the visual "hints" presents in other applications. E.g. there is no way to answer to a specific message, there is no way to "pin" messages, different messages from the same person aren't easy to identify, overall experience is not great compared to modern instant messaging apps like WhatsApp/signal and can be frustrating... there are a lot of things that I would love to see, but I understand that they will not magically appear if no one will work on them

[–] poVoq@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There are some underlaying reasons why some of these features do not exist, it is not (only) because the client developers do not want to implement them.

[–] Jama@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I think this could be done even on client side, at least I have some ideas (e.g. "pinned" messages could be just messages with a "room" tag locally saved on the device and chronologically ordered; answering a message can be implemented with markdown and a local search for the message when tapped on it). Of course I have absolutely no idea how hard it could be :D

[–] brombek@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I am no Android developer but apparently you can use Kotlin for that:

https://developer.android.com/kotlin/

[–] Jama@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Yep, I thought about Kotlin, maybe if I can learn that I could help jerboa development too :D