Old dog trying to learn new tricks.

[Perna00]

I’ve had some previous programming experience in school with dos, qbasic, and recent made a few excel macros. I seem to learn it very quickly but it’s been years since I’ve really dwelled into it. I’m just got into modding a few application on my truck (ford that uses QNX) and started looking into making my own code versus downloading others. I’m noticing that there are 100’s of languages and changes since I researched it 20 years ago. I’ve also did some modding of game systems to run emulators. I’m done a few to an oculus I mess with but never my own code.

To make a long story short…what language should I start to research/learn that would be the most beneficial to start with that I could plan on doing some minor programming or modifications with…? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[WhiteCube]

That is a tricky question.

One glib answer would be, the language to use is the language you have the best manual for.

Another answer is that it doesn't matter which you choose because they all support the same modern programming paradigm.

From a curmudgeon perspective, when you combine huge libraries with a interactive development environment, you're not really "programming" at all, just using menus. Nothing to brag about.

You could take the "invent your own language" path. That way you only have to write one program (an interpreter) and throw all your manuals away.

The web seems to be here to stay, perhaps Javascript is a good choice. Is that programming, or publishing?

What would Charles Babbage do?

Probably write in fortran, email his code to a shared computer, and get the output two days later.

Just my opinion.

 

[Perna00]

I greatly appreciate the input…although I can’t say I feel any closer to finding my ideal answer. But maybe the perspective of your answer puts mine in line with it on how vague and a tangent idea it was to get back into programming…hmm

 

[WhiteCube]

You were right about there being hundreds of languages.

The problem is, no programmer has experience of them all, so asking which one is the most beneficial is just going to lead to arguments.

The forum could have an interesting discussion about which is the worst language, and then you could research/learn anything but that.

 

[Sdfgbdfbhdfhfg54yeh]

if you're wanting to try out different languages and see what works there are online compilers... That way you dont have to spend effort installing and setting up the environment.