Hi All,
I don't see any thread discuss about the pros and cons of different languages to help beginners, but i'm asking for a slightly different reason. I have been programming for about 1 year now, and I know only Visual Basic. I am planning to learn some other programming langauges. I've learned that once you've learned one language, pretty much all you have to do is learn a new syntax to learn a new language. So, now I'll get to the point. I think that I should begin to specialize in a language. I don't know which language I should learn and master it. So which language is most popular in industry. I know that it probably depends on what applications you are doing, but i figured i'd ask. Many thanks.

What's popular in industry depends on what you plan on doing. For websites/servers in a corporate setting, the .net stuff is very popular. And part of the .net stuff you have c# or even visual basic.

There are many other languages for different types of work as well. Let's say you are going to be doing programming for financial modelling... Visual Basic is the industry standard. Let's say you want to work with databases and reporting. In that case, SQL is pretty much the standard there.

I would recommend NOT specializing. The best is to know ALL the popular ones. For example, IF you can learn .net and CGI/Perl/PHP, then it won't matter what system your employer/customer uses. You will be able to work with like 99% of all web servers/web sites.

As a programmer, select an industry you want to be in and become an expert in at least the top 2 languages for that industry. That way you will be in high demand and can get good paying jobs.

My dad works with NASA and they still use FORTRAN, Basic, C, and some other primordial languages. Then again, he has to learn Java, ASP, Perl, and Visual Basic on top of those.

Yes, good old plain Basic I remember when I first bought a computer. It was Commodore 64 (rev. B I think), and it was used all over the world, and I think NASA used them as well

I'm primarily VB programmer, or maybe better, BASIC programmer. However, I learned PHP/MySQL, Pascal, and I'm thinking of starting to learn C (plain C, C++, C#, no matter), Delphi, and such...

I work as a programmer, and we primarily use Visual Basic for our programming, but we plan on switching to Delphi, as it is more powerfull than Visual Basic, in the area we work, and that include manipulating with 4 COM ports, 1 COM port that has to issue a new command every 11ms, and so on...

So, in conclusion, everything people wrote here stands. You shouldn't pick just one language, and specialize in it. You could end up knowing a dead language... VB is easy, and has high productivity, but in some low level stuff, it is very limited... Instead, learn several different languages, and you will have the advantage, you'll be able to write any kind of software...

what you interesting u learn it,i am interesting in design websites,so i learn CGI/Perl/PHP first,after that,i learn Visual Basic.

Well, as of right now, I only deal with server-side scripting languages for my website. I recommend PHP for that, but learning some Perl/CGI wouldn't hurt. I was programming in Perl before PHP. Anyway, like everyone's said: Learn many different languages. No one particular programming language can help you with everything that you may need to do.

As no9t9 pointed out, it all depends on what you want to do. If you are planning on becoming a web developer, you'll need to know server-side scripting, and I guess knowing SOAP and such can be handy in case you are going to build web services.

In general though I'd say you should learn different types of languages. Learn some C and C++, because they are always handy to know. But I suggest you also try your hand at Prolog or similar, since it works completely different from procedural or OO programming.


And for the love something, please learn to write clean, readable and maintainable code.