What programming language should I learn?
What programming language should I learn?
I don't really want to go in depth into programming, I just want to know what I'm looking at if I ever come across anything like that at my job (mechanical engineering) and maybe solve some simple problems.
I learned C and Java in my first year in college, but it's all mostly forgotten. I'm leaning towards Python since I read it's relatively simple and used a lot nowadays, and it's what my teachers used later on in college anyway.
What do you guys think?
Thanks in advance!
Another vote for Python. It's quick to learn the basics, and there are libraries available to let you achieve most anything. You can program it in a procedural, functional or object-oriented way, and if you understand those, you'll be well set-up to learn any other language. You may not need to learn any other languages - Python is both comprehensive and available in most places, and you can make a career out of it.
My primary problem with Python is that its unstructured nature causes bigger projects to collapse into a big ball of mud after a while - any function being able to accept any argument is more of a curse than a blessing. And I wouldn't want to code collaboratively in it - Java, for all it gets shit, is blessfully limited in what nonsense my coworkers can get up to.
It's also not 'fast', although it's made great strides. I did Advent Of Code in Python this year; a simple rewrite in C++ only acheived about a 4× speed-up, when it used to be 10× a few years ago, and that's for some very algorithm-heavy code. Python multithreading is still pretty terrible, though, so if you're really wanting to get the best out of your computer you'll want to use a native-code library like NumPy, or use some other language.
Python or Go.
I recommend people try learning Python through Jupyter Notebooks as a first attempt. It’s nice being able to run individual blocks of code and auto printing of output is great for learning more quickly.
Go is just a generally straightforward language and is known for being productive after a short time of learning. Plus generating binaries that can run anywhere can be a motivator if you’re planning on sharing the output of your programming.