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You've already got the atitude to be an excellent programmer. Your success is assured if you learn more than one programming language. For you purposes, learn P
by xirium 19y ago
You've already got the atitude to be an excellent programmer. Your success is assured if you learn more than one programming language. For you purposes, learn Pascal, learn C, learn Perl, learn JavaScript. This will minimise your learning curve and risk of failure while giving you increasing power and understanding.
- dfranke 19y agoUgh. Pascal? What for?
- xirium 19y agoA langauge with strong typing and bound checking is ideal when you're learning algorithms. A newbie coding a bubble sort in Pascal encounters less mysterious failure modes than a newbie coding a bubble sort in C. (Consider the off-by-one gotcha at the end of the inner loop.) I know that strongly typed languages are unpopular on this forum and I've been downmodded for mentioning one. However, consider the suggested progression of languages to be like riding a bicycle and then having the training wheels removed.
- dfranke 19y agoI like static typing, but Pascal seems like a weird choice. Why not ML, or even Java?
- xirium 19y agoI don't have direct experience of ML but I'd definitely recommend against Java because there's a tsumani of information. It is overwhelming for a newbie. Pascal is small and concise. The grammar is unambiguous. You know when you've outgrown it and you'll move on. When you master Pascal then C looks trivial. When you master C then Perl looks positively slack. This can be done while minimising information overload.