What do you evaluate before learning a new programming language? 📊

💡 I recently decided to learn a new programming language!

I wanted to automate processes more simply and efficiently than using Java or Golang, which seemed quite verbose for what I wanted to do ... 🛠🖥

Here are some points that caught my attention when choosing #Python

• It is a readable, simple and quick to learn language.

• Multipurpose (Python can be used for Data Science, Machine Learning, Web Development & Automation).

• The community is large.

• There are many Libraries and Frameworks.

• The language is growing fast and is becoming more and more popular.

What about you? What do you evaluate when learning a new programming language? 📊

Comments

[Tobias Nickel]

I never think: "ohh, I want to learn a new programming language.".

Still sometimes a programming language catch my attention. Look at rust, urghh, so ugly, and gone,...
And that was enough to learn about the actually very cool rust compiler that does lots of optimizations at compile time. and has a clear data model with data ownership to avoid surprising side effects.

My colleagues like go, it is cool and it has its place, but for the type of applications we build, I believe with typescript we get more stuff done.

Recently I looked at beef while it looks very clean, it just did not run stable in my test, and you can not hire any beef lang developer.

I tried many languages, and understand their ideas. Good is that you can often carry such ideas from one language to another. And even sometimes enforce them via lint rules.

While I get into many languages but at some point jump off the train, I rarely feel of waisted effort. it is important to look around, not onlybin my own niche.

[Guillaume Falourd]

Good is that you can often carry such ideas from one language to another
It's exactly that. There are so many languages available today that knowing the basics of programming is more important than anything else.

Each language has advantages and disadvantages compared to others, and some fit better according to the context in which we work.

Thank you for sharing your experience :)

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

One simple question: ‘Does this solve some problem I have or have an immediate use for me?’

I learned Elixir because I wanted a language to work with that made concurrency dead simple (and you can’t get much more easily concurrent than running on BEAM).

I learned Python because the simplicity of the language lends itself very well to rapid prototyping and because it had an immediate practical use.

I learned JS/HTML/CSS because it’s honestly far easier and more portable than almost any GUI framework you care to name.

I learned Lua years ago because I had an actual use for it (a lot of things embed Lua).

I learned PowerShell (to a rudimentary level) because I needed to do scripting on Windows.

And I have similar stories for most of the other languages I know.

I’m a bit of an odd case though in that I already know, at a passable level when combined with proper documentation, a lot of languages by the standards of most people my age, and therefore chances are I already know a language that covers what I need for any arbitrary project I start.

[Guillaume Falourd]

I agree, it's good to have experience with several languages to be able to choose the one that best fits our context. To automate the processes I needed, Python looked like the better choice, but other languages could have done it too, just not as efficiently as Python.

Thank you for sharing your experience :)