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Areti Panou
Areti Panou

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Learning a new programming language

Code newbie question: How do you choose the language you want to learn to program in? Is there a course or resource that tells you what sort of problems are solved by each language?

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dpashutskii profile image
Dmitrii Pashutskii

I mostly chose by simple characteristics: my personal preferences, curiosity, hype, etc.
It's really hard to say how to understand what problems could be solved by specific language especially because most languages are general-purpose.

If you wanna just general self-development, without any goals I love approach to try languages which have opposite paradigms from your main language. It allowы you to expand your knowledge and get a different point of views on programming itself.

For example, you're using Ruby or Python which both are interpreted with dynamic typing languages. Also very often used for OOP style and you're using them for the back end development.

In that case, you can try a static compiled language for example: Go, C++.
Or languages with functional programming style: Clojure, Haskel.
Or if we're going crazy Logic programming: Prolog language.
Also, you can try front-end development: JavaScript/HTML/CSS
Also maybe a good idea to learn the C language to work with memory closer.

etc.

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droopy12 profile image
Areti Panou

That is a helpful point, I'll look into. Thanks!

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droopy12 profile image
Areti Panou

Maybe a follow up. What I am looking for is somehow a correlation between domain and language. For example for AI/ML it would be Python? For IoT? For financial apps? For lightweight browser apps?
Does this make sense?