Long time programmers, which two programming languages from this list do you suggest someone to learn and why?
1. JavaScript
2. C#
3. Java
4. One of your choice
2. C#
3. Java
4. One of your choice
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ElwoodBlues · M
Depends on what the learner plans to do. If she's going into a STEM field, I recommend Python as a first language. It's a nice friendly interpreter; pretty good at catching your bugs, and a very expressive language. Plus there are tons of libraries useful in many STEM fields.
2nd language for person going into a STEM field: plain ol' C. C is a small language and thus easy to learn; also full of pitfalls. But the only reason a Python programmer needs to know C is to rewrite a few routines that need to be made time or memory efficient. So the Python user in need of efficiency can avoid many of C's pitfalls such as nested header files and weird "pointer to array of pointers" type mismatches.
Funny story: I had a friend with some cool realtime video processing algorithms from his school days. A company hired him and asked him to translate his code from C++ to Java. Because Java has no memory leaks. But Java would use a new buffer at each stage of the processing; 10 or 15 buffers per frame of video. And Java would happily allocate new memory each time ... until it needed to garbage collect. At which point the realtime code was falling hopelessly behind realtime. The way my friend put it, instead of no memory leaks, EVERY buffer became a memory leak that would eventually drag down performance!
2nd language for person going into a STEM field: plain ol' C. C is a small language and thus easy to learn; also full of pitfalls. But the only reason a Python programmer needs to know C is to rewrite a few routines that need to be made time or memory efficient. So the Python user in need of efficiency can avoid many of C's pitfalls such as nested header files and weird "pointer to array of pointers" type mismatches.
Funny story: I had a friend with some cool realtime video processing algorithms from his school days. A company hired him and asked him to translate his code from C++ to Java. Because Java has no memory leaks. But Java would use a new buffer at each stage of the processing; 10 or 15 buffers per frame of video. And Java would happily allocate new memory each time ... until it needed to garbage collect. At which point the realtime code was falling hopelessly behind realtime. The way my friend put it, instead of no memory leaks, EVERY buffer became a memory leak that would eventually drag down performance!
