What language should I learn

[Cyber72]

I learned to program in the days of pascal, cobol and RPG and I'd like to learn something new. There seem to be so many. I am thinking HTML or python. The motivation is to do it as a hobby that may stave off brain atrophy but I'd like to work towards being able to write something useful. So what I'm asking is what are the good and bad points of different languages in terms of what I can use them for and how easy they are to learn and as a secondary point if I might want to earn some money somewhere down the line. Are there any good youtube tutorials?

How difficult is it to 'learn Linux' - I'm not quite sure what that means but I see it is one of the tags.

[DarkAmbient]

Personally I think HTML5 (and everything about it) is the way to go for the future. But my suggestion would be to try out some different languages and deicide for yourself.

[emersonkelly]

To have bright future HTML5, PHP or Cloud Computing are the best and easy to learn. For HTML5 and PHP best tutorial is w3schools.com. For cloud computing I don't have any idea!!

[Vaphell]

w3schools is of questionable quality http://w3fools.com/

[Tony Flury]

Cloud computing isn't a language - it is a design paradigm - you could write cloud applications in many languages (although some are easier than others i would imagine) - and I would imagine some Cloud providers provide SDKs (or libraries) to allow simple access to their services.

HTML5 is a markup language only isn't it ? i.e.instructions for a viewer (typically a web page) on how to display data or other information. As far as I know you can't actually process data in HTML5 - I might be wrong - i am not up to date with HTML5.

If you are interested in doing web based applications - then a good combination would be HTML and CSS (for the display), PHP or python (for server side processing), Javascript (for client side validation and effects), and some SQL engine on your server - for persistent data storage.

If you are doing desktop applications - then In my opinion python (and maybe a GUI toolkit is a good starting choice).

[DarkAmbient]

HTML5 is a markup language only isn't it ? i.e.instructions for a viewer (typically a web page) on how to display data or other information. As far as I know you can't actually process data in HTML5 - I might be wrong - i am not up to date with HTML5.

You are correct, HTML can't process variables. That's where Javascript or PHP etc. comes in. What I do (and I guess others) is referring to web-development as a whole with HTML#.

[shaktiman1234]

You did not tell what are your requirements. If you you want to do web programming, Go for php, html, javascript, css and that is more than enough. For shell scripting perl is enough and rest I personally feel that everyone must know c++.

[Stovey]

Hi. For much the same reason as you I am studying Python. I learned BASIC many years ago and wanted to learn something new. Python (for me) seems to be a very easy and almost fun language; the syntax just seems to be very 'clean'.

I read the book "Python Programming: an Introduction to Computer Science", and now I'm looking through "The Quick Python Book" as a review and to fill in the gaps.

HTML5 is probably useful to know, but I don't think it is a full-fledged language. Maybe it is better described as a "declarative mini-language"?

[mevun]

If you are interested in web and cloud computing, I would suggest learning Javascript (and HTML5) in the client/browser side. Now that there is a technology called node.js, you can also use Javascript in the server.

I don't know Cobol or RPG, but Pascal is a static-typed language. Nearly all the newer (compared to the ones you listed) languages are dynamic-typed, including Javascript. This is much easier for humans, since we pretty much can tell the difference between an integer, float, or string and dislike having to keep telling the compiler the type.

Many newer languages are also object-oriented, but Javascript is a bit different from the common OO languages like C++ and Java. That's just to let you know that whatever you learn about OO in Javascript might be harder/easier to apply to C++ or Java, if you ever want to learn those.

That said, Python is still a good choice. It is dynamic-typed and object-oriented. It was the next language I learned after Pascal, C, C++, Perl, and Java. Now I am learning Ruby, an even more object-oriented language than Python. In this case, I want to do Ruby-on-Rails, a web framework that I hope is easier for development than Java web apps.

[trent.josephsen]

The thing about questions like this is that everybody's going to chime in with their own excellent arguments about which languages are best[1], but you won't really get a good idea what's appropriate for you. So you want to learn programming / update your skills? Good! Pick a language, any language. If your only goal is to stave off brain atrophy, it doesn't matter whether you learn Java or French.

[1] Perl, Python, and C, in no particular order.

So what I'm asking is what are the good and bad points of different languages in terms of what I can use them for and how easy they are to learn and as a secondary point if I might want to earn some money somewhere down the line.

That's a very vague question, and answering it completely would require a lot more work than any of us is willing to give. Slightly relevant.

How difficult is it to 'learn Linux' - I'm not quite sure what that means but I see it is one of the tags.

I don't know what that means either. It's a bit like asking "How difficult is it to learn cars?" If you're a good student you can learn to drive (poorly) in an afternoon. It might take years to become a mechanic. It might take a decade or longer to become an automotive engineer.

If you haven't read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way before, I recommend it. It's oriented a little more toward technical questions, but yours is something of what he calls an "open-ended time sink". Specificity is a great thing for a question to have.