AtomicMaster

Java is not the most popular programming language, C/C++ is still more popular, don't follow the propaganda...

OO gets as complex as you make it. I mean you throw in complex data-structures like dancing trees, templating, virtual classes and virtual inheritance and you got yourself a party!

Java is no more, and i would argue is less complex than C and Python. You can express object design in C, while cumbersome, it is doable. And Python is also an object-oriented language. Objects are just ways to represent your data, there is nothing scary about them

Programmers have to learn how to program, syntax is merely a language in which you express your programming ideas, it's like a color in a painting, you have to know form, you have to know shape, you have to know how your idea will read before you draw something, color, while important, is not the end of the world, you can have a painting in one color that still conveys your idea. Same thing with programming, when you know how to program, syntax is merely the language to expressing your solution. It can limit you, and there are some different programming types which make that not a blanket statement, but for the most part, it is true, you know what structures you need, what constructs, what constrains, what data, etc depending on the complexity of your program (could be contexts, namespaces, semaphores, locks, sockets, etc, etc). Once you know what you need to do, you can look up the syntax of doing it in whatever language you are using, you also learn its constraints and so you have to sometimes find other solutions, but that is what makes it fun in the first place to learn a new language

Yep, its up, I just checked it. But it does seem to be very intermittent. They do have some problems.

Wait if you wanted C++ done differently, wouldn't you do Go? Also C++ is C++ done right, just because someone doesn't learn their language history doesn't meand that C++ is all of a sudden somehow wrong... Python was designed to teach students how to write code correctly, yes, it is a great language to start with.

So can Python, C# .net with Mono, and both are arguably more platform independent than Java, Java heavily depends on the runtime environment, libraries available in Oracle JRE for example are not all avilable in OpenJRE or Dalvik. And Java doesn't run on every machine, if oracle doesn't make a JRE for a platform, Java doesn't run on the platform, at least well, take Raspberry Pi for example... Mr Greg, JS many beautiful things exist; jquery (i use it all the time), angular, node (can be very useful) and the ones i've been looking into lately three and ember which is kind of like RoR, but in JS and for browser-side apps...

HTML is not a programming language. ecoli, if you are looking into doing computationally-heavy modeling work, for really heavy stuff, like i work on a system with over 1000 GPUs kind of stuff, focus on C++ with MPI and Cuda, if you are looking at the financial market, then learn Java.

Oh no doubt. I am a firm believer in that if you know how to code, language is (within reason) just a syntax to express your solution.

Attempting to answer/comment on everything up to this point: The thread is about languages to learn, not necessarily good languages to learn to program in. If we were talking about best beginner languages, then i think that no language is better than Python; it was developed for the purpose of teaching people how to program. Not sure what John is talking about, Python is no more difficult to learn than PHP or Ruby or JavaScript, it is easier than Java unless your background is strictly in C++. C has tons of uses, there are things that just don't need object orientation, like boot loaders for example, memory management, and tons of other OS/Firmware areas. But what you loose in C++, specifically direct memory management of your program environment, is a necessity, and so C, even assembly is still useful. And it's still simpler than C++, OO, while having its' uses, sometimes makes code extremely complex. Modern compilers don't care where the variables are declared, there would be no gain in performance if the variables were defined all over the code (like in C++), its just how the language was defined in 1972 because it was easier back then to do it that way, and because you can still compile a program written in 1972 on modern compilers (i.e. the language has changed very little and is extremely backwards-compatible), and for the most part vise-versa, you have to declare your variables in the beginning. Syntax highlighting has been around for a while, and everyone SHOULD use a syntax-highlighting text editor to program (if they are not using an IDE, which i prefer not to). I do not understand any teacher that forces their students to use something nano-like. What you use for an editor is your choice, but use modern editors, they will help you write less error-prone code. Also as a point of note, Sun Microsystems was around for 28 years, and seized to exist in 2010. Java appeared in 1995 and since acquisition in 2010 has been developed by the Oracle corporation. Also what does it mean "That language was barely even broken into!"? C# is pretty cool, when you use it with Mono And yes, programming has changed significantly since the 1980s

A prostitute that fell asleep on the back seat of a semi split the victory podium of Paris Dakar...

Young son of a prison guard wakes up every morning when his dad runs a baton across the posts of his little crib.

A Chinese olympic diver was pushed off of a sky-scraper in Beijing yesterday, but he didn't panic, straightened up and entered the ground without a splash. A monk that got tangled up in bell clapper lines, opened for the minimal techno festival on long island...

Scientists have finally uncovered the secret of the centaur: what you need is a man and a very curious horse....

I suppose i should do this before too late. Hi, I'm Alex! I break other people's toys. I like to know things about a lot of things...

I don't understand what you are doing because the concepts are too advanced, therefore it is wrong

Ed, if you have time and want to have fun (and by fun i mean make your head hurt), metaprogramming is a TON of fun in Python (and also very scary, i should mention that i got very scared of the concept some time through the video, and am yet to finish it, but it really is a great intro all the way through to advanced). Check this out:

As the name suggests C++ is just a superset of C, meaning that it does what C does (for the most part, compilers made C++ slightly easier in a few ways, but did take some control away), and also some more stuff. C is purely functional language, doesn't mean it's bad, there are problems where lower level control is required and there is no need for OO, like kernels for example. Non object oriented languages are typically easier to understand than object oriented, at least until you get the hang of OOP at which point some problems become easier to solve than trying to doing the same thing in a functional language. That said C++ can be used as both functional and object oriented, so as far as C being an easier way to do programming, the statement is incorrect. Learning to program is not about knowing a language, languages are just tools to be used to do what you need the computer to do. Learning to program is to learn how to get the computer to solve one or another problem, at which point language becomes merely syntax, grammar, and a few peculiar semantics, rather than say learning a completely different and new way to solve the problem every time, without using any structures you used in any other language. If you know that a loop is the most optimal solution to a particular problem on a particular architecture, regardless of a language, you know what you need to find to make this loop happen. It will look differently syntactically, but the solution is still the same, so writing it in any language becomes a matter of a syntax lookup...

I would say that yes C++ and Java are good languages to learn as far as language knowledge for career goes. However they are pretty not friendly to new programmers, linguistically they are difficult (think about everything you do to output simple characters on the screen), conceptually they get VERY advanced (Virtual Inheritance).

I think it would be easier to list languages that you should not bother learning, and really, either because they are poor languages, or that they are just old and shouldn't be used by anyone, other than that, every language has it's perks and applications, weirdnesses and frustrations, pluses and minuses. I have learned and used over 30 and i code in about 15 in the course of work and my daily interactions with technology (more if i count languages that rotate in and out) and i have no intention of stopping from learning the next language i may have to learn for whatever purpose... Better question perhaps is what programming language is best for doing [task]..?