Which programming language should I learn? (Updated)

[alex.john95]

I also think that u can learn Java.

[michaelp]

What do you mean by "i also think you can learn java"?
Do you mean you can learn Java of as a programming language? :S

[Aziz]

I also think that you can learn English, and how to not spam with pointless comments

[dc116]

I heard Java is really hard so I'm sticking to the easier ones for now.

[Insectoid]

All right! Thread revival!

dc116, Java isn't hard, it's just a pain in the arse, with its ridiculous method names and you-can-only-do-it-this-way style of programming. Try out Perl (very flexible and damn good fun) for a procedural language or Ruby for OOP (those being the only languages in which I have any experience at all besides Turing and Java).

[Aziz]

Or Python...

Java can be what you make it - don't let extremists hold you back from doing something. It's just there's usually a reason to it, even if the reason is more complicated than you need to understand at that point.

[wtd]

Java is a lowest common denominator language. It's reasonably straightforward, honestly, and for the intelligent programmer who has some knowledge of object-oriented programming, the learning curve is fairly short, but once you do learn it...

It doesn't really reward further learning by making things easier.

[Dragoonh]

Hey just randomly poping this out here I want to try programming out to see if I like it and if I do I plan on going into something like the gaming industry which language should I learn?

[Aziz]

Didn't you read the post and the 7 pages of documents?

I'd suggest, Python.

[btiffin]

Dragoonh @ Tue Feb 03, 2009 6:01 pm wrote:

Hey just randomly poping this out here I want to try programming out to see if I like it and if I do I plan on going into something like the gaming industry which language should I learn?

To tinker with game programming, I'd suggest Flash, Squeak or Scratch. Flash may actually get you sales or a job. The Smalltalks maybe not so much, but game programming is a lot more about game theory and the kind of creativity that attracts people than coding in a particular language.

A professional shop will likely ask for a fairly solid grasp of C++, but in reality, they'll be using highly sophisticated and less than mainstream toolkits. Bare metal programming is likely a very small chunk of the efforts in most of today's high end games.

For small games, Flash is great way to start and get noticed.

Perhaps take a kick at Inform-7. Write a text-adventure game. If you are creative, a few pages of writing and you'll get a good feel if people may like the games you are likely to produce. Anyone else reading this; Inform-7 is the height and epitome of Natural Language compiler design, in my humble opinion. Worthy of a look if you care about such things.

Cheers

[Aziz]

You're promoting that again, b? I cannot comprhend it, there are no 1's and 0's. Can I make an endless loop, though? Memory leak?

[btiffin]

Aziz @ Tue Feb 03, 2009 10:14 pm wrote:

You're promoting that again, b? I cannot comprhend it, there are no 1's and 0's. Can I make an endless loop, though? Memory leak?

Sure; drop down to Inform-6 http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/doc412.html

Cheers

[ashtonfarell]

Hey wtd
if you are beginner in programming language then you should prefer to teach C and C++. This is basic language which helps you to be a small programmer. then you should try to learn any web developing language like ASP.net and PHP. These both language are now good in market.

[SmokeMonster]

I'm thinking of learning another language in the next month before school starts again but I can't seem to decide upon one. I always wanted to learn a pure functional programming language (since right now I've mostly worked with C, Java & Ruby) so I was considering Clojure but Scala sounds really tempting considering all the hype around it. Which one should I pick?

[apython1992]

Yay functional programming! I've learned a little bit of Haskell (not enough time to _really_ learn it) and I love the paradigm. I can see why people think it's too academic though. Scala is actually used industrially, which makes it rather tempting to learn. Given that you have only a month (I'm assuming you won't have much time when school starts), it might be unreasonable to learn a language like Haskell. How well do you know Ruby? It has support for functional programming concepts, and if you know it well enough you might have an easier time. You really must understand Lambda calculus to get functional programming, so that's a great place to start if you feel like learning a bit of more formal math.