One of my former students asked me what is the most in-demand programming language now, for he wants to study it. He said, he wants to get a job easily after he graduated so he wants to study a programming language that will give him a career.
I’ve been with the same dilemma when I was still in college. There are times that I want to be a master in Assembly language, or in C, or in Delphi, or in VB, or in Java or Python. In most of the times, I always want to learn Java. So, I studied it and show interest of learning it. I even attended a month-long training about Java programming. But guess what, I just learned the basics, and nothing more than that.
In our curriculum (in Computer Engineering), we taken up four programming languages courses – C, VB, Java, and Assembly language. If I’m not mistaken, those four languages were also included in the curriculum of BSCS and BSIT plus additional course for WebDev. Now, what’s on that four programming languages that were not on other programming languages? Okay, let’s make them five. Let me add PHP for WebDev. Why these languages were included in the curriculum? I, honestly, don’t know. But I believe for their purposes.
If you would give a deeper look at them, those five languages have obviously different purposes. Our school doesn’t wants us to master all those languages (but you may, if you want). Our school wants us to realize what language we are comfortable with. Our school wants us to know in ourselves what programming language fits in our personality.
If you love lighting LED or make some electronic devices work programmatically, you’d love to learn Assembly language or C. If you love interfacing your PC to any hardware, you could find C and VB very useful. If you love developing desktop systems, you’d love VB. If you want to develop online applications, PHP is for you. If you want to develop your own game, Java will help you. The only challenge here is to know what you want to do, to know what you love to do, and to know which you are comfortable of.
Another good thing about those languages is once you got familiarized one of them, you can easily study for a new one. If you’re good in Assembly language, you could be also good in C. If you’re good in C, C++ is easy to study. Java might be easy for you too. If you love Java, you could learn Python too. If you love VB, you could be a great developer using the .NET framework. If you love PHP, you might also want to learn Ruby. Every new learning start with those programming languages that were included in your course’s curriculum.
Here’s my tip for you, or you can consider it as a friendly advice. Don’t force yourself to learn a language just because there’s a great demand for it. Choose what you love. Choose which you’re comfortable. Become a master of it. Then begin to study another language which has quite same syntax to your mastered language. You can be a master of that language to. And remember this (my former prof told it to me, Ma’am Donna), “As long as your programming language is still doing it’s purpose, there’s no need to study a new one”. Additional from me, “… But never close your mind for innovations.”
I hope you got something from me.
Class Dismiss
This is a great analysis, actually focusing on one language can cause you programming myopia (I hope I got the spelling right). Wherein you are focused on just one language and could not go with the others.
My advice, as I always say, is to to become the master of algorithms rather than the language. Syntax can easily be learn but forming an algorithm as fast as soon as you see the problem is the hardest thing that even professors or tutorials over the net can’t teach you. 🙂
Nice point @aji. Be a master of algorithm. I should have a post about that. Or maybe you want to do a guest post with that topic. ;p
guest posting about algorithm sounds great.. i haven’t done any guest posting for the past few weeks 🙂
If you’re interested to make a guest post with that topic, I would be very grateful. 🙂
Only if you have time. 🙂
Of course, there is no doubt, I am for java!
Thank you for some other informative website. Where else may just I get that type of info written in such a perfect way? I’ve a mission that I am simply now operating on, and I have been at the look out for such info.
Dont have much knowledge with prog’g language, heard many times about C++, Turbo C etc etc but never had the chance understanding them 😀 Interesting write up anyway 😀 Good Job
thanks for dropping by @wdoutjah:disqus . Programming is great as long as understanding the basics is the first focus of the person who want to learn.