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>
> One of the questions I asked myself and still do is "What language do I learn?" as
> there are so many out there and whenever you ask people, there is a different
> response each time, and I agree that there are too many languages, granted they do
> different things and work in different ways but what one does a developer chose to
> learn over a certain language and why.
...
> I sometimes hold the opinion that there should only be around five programming
> languages. Low level, interpreted, scripted, compiled, web: ASM, BASIC, Perl, C,
> PHP
>
My answer to this question is:
You don't set out to learn specific languages, you start by learning the basic
building blocks to solve problems using logic. As you learn more you will recognise
common patterns and you will become a lego master and everything will be Awesome!
but start small, with Loops, conditions and local data variables, These are the most
basic logic statements that are composed into blocks that represent specific logical
instructions, these in turn are composed into larger blocks to create programmes or
the components of programmes that can be fitted together like lego blocks that
perform specific tasks.
The syntax a language, is unimportant to an extent but the choices are vast, and you
can make your life easier buy concentrating initially on a class of languages that
have a common syntax known as ECMA.
For ease, i would advise most newbies try their hand with an ECMA language, then as
they get to grips with the layers that build up a system, they will find languages
at each level that use ECMA syntax and this will ease the learning of the specific
enhancements in the chosen software tools, by this I mean compilers, runtimes,
parsers etc.
You should also learn SQL. SQL is a language, but its not a programming language per
se, it is language to read, edit and remove data.
Its not obligatory, but the vast majority of paid software work involves a lot of
data!
and with data comes presentation, so as a starting point, learn HTML, its friend CSS
and the ECMA language; Javascript. When you can do that Node, C# and Java are ECMA
languages in the next layer(the web server) and C/C++ on the server itself with ASM
at the lowest level, it is best used with C.
If you can master these you can write software that targets everything from the raw
hardware to the UI of a mobile phone.
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