this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Learn Programming

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Just a kid with a computer here. I am familiar and have reached a reasonable level of fluency with javascript and python, with typescript being a somewhat satisfying switch I made.

It's been 4 years, I haven't touched another language. I wanna study something future proof and genuinely helpful. The reason I never went beyond js and py was because I already had everything I needed, I could make anything I wanted. I really want to dip my toes in the strong programming waters.

Can you suggest a language?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I had a similar trajectory to you in my early languages. Then I decided I wanted to have at least one more performant language under my belt so that I didn’t have to hit everything at work with the good old Python hammer. I also wanted to be able to easily ship binary packages for multiple platforms, so I wanted something compiled.

I looked at C, in which tons of my favorite small but powerful utilities were written. But there are so many niceties you can get in more modern languages. I spent a few weeks each learning Rust & Go, and found the latter much easier to work with. I felt like I was able to “think in Go” and never quite got there with Rust. I’m sure many people feel just the opposite, but that’s kind of the point. There are so many choices out there and any “mainstream” language would be fine for you to learn.

As someone else mentioned, the best thing you can do are work on your programming fundamentals which often transcend language. But if you want to put yourself in a position to have some of those fundamentals enforced, consider a strongly typed, compiled language which gives good feedback during development.