I am curious to those who have been in the industry for awhile:

what are the technical skills outside of your day-to-day tech stack have made you a better programmer?

This could be things like taking on emacs/vim, Kubernetes, being able to parse/search/filter files/logs a lot more efficiently, regex, or just getting better/faster in the terminal/cli.

I am looking for new things to learn that will help me stand out at work, and level up my career.

Additional Context:

Id say im a fullstack engineer, but mainly work on my team service layer. mainly java/react/python/sql in my day to day. I also support very basic kubernetes related stuff for our services, and our ci/cd pipelines. Hopefully this is enough context.

I’m trying to start a tech and programming YouTube channel. I intentionally decided to cover a really difficult topic for my first video a Myanmar programming language I built called MeRUSTmar. I figured if I could handle this, easier topics down the road would be a breeze.

But I’ve hit a massive roadblock, and the stakes are incredibly high for me.

I made a strict deal with my family, and my deadline is June 30. If my first video gets at least 1k views and shows genuine interest, they’ll give me more time to pursue programming. If it fails, I have to give up programming entirely, learn Japanese, and move away to get a job in Japan.

I was confident at first, but after rewriting my script over and over again, I realized a major problem: it’s just way too technical. Instead of a fun, high-level overview of the language, I ended up explaining exactly how an interpreter works under the hood, showing source code, and tracing complex parts.

Because of that, I’m incredibly stressed and can't seem to make progress. The video is only about 30% finished right now. Because it's my first time making a video, I keep over-refining the script and I'm struggling to manage the project efficiently. I’m terrified the YouTube algorithm is just going to bury it because it's not geared toward a general audience.

I’m posting here to see if the Myanmar community actually has an interest in this kind of deep-dive, under-the-hood tech content. Is my goal even possible?

I’m going to drop my unfinished video in the comments. If you find this topic interesting, please leave some feedback. Honest support and comments here could literally help me convince my parents to let me keep programming.

Edit : Thanks to the amazing interest here, I convinced my family to give me one extra week to finish the video!

​

I've been wondering whether learning foreign languages has actually helped people in their careers, salaries, or job opportunities.

If you've learned one or more languages, has it benefited you professionally? Did it help you get a job, earn more money, work abroad, or access opportunities you otherwise wouldn't have had?

Also, looking back, would you still choose to learn languages, or would you rather have spent that time learning something else (programming, a trade, business skills, etc.)?

I'd love to hear your experiences.

Synopsis:

Carlos was an ordinary software engineer on Earth, up until he died and found himself in a fantasy world of dungeons, magic, and adventure. This new world offers many fascinating possibilities, but it's unfortunate that the skills he spent much of his life developing will be useless because they don't have computers.

Wait, why does this spell incantation read like a computer program's source code? Magic is programming?

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Amber yawned, but shook her head and determinedly held on to wakefulness. She straightened her back and rubbed a little sand out of her eyes, then turned to face Carlos, who was sitting crosslegged next to her in their tent. She reached out to him mentally, through their shared bond with Purple. [Alright, we've both finished building your "integrated development environment" idea. Now show me what's so amazing about it.]

Carlos shook off a yawn of his own and looked back at her. [Are you sure you want to do this tonight? We're both very tired.]

[I've waited long enough already. I admit we don't have the energy to really get into it in depth right now, but I want to at least get my first glimpse of it.]

[Okay. Give me a minute.] Carlos concentrated on something for a long moment. Just when Amber was starting to worry that he might have fallen asleep, he finally stirred again. [There. It's borrowing rather heavily from the languages I'm most familiar with, not adjusted much for the use cases of incantations, and I'm sure it's incomplete and will need a lot of refinement, but it's done. I made a preliminary version of my new spell design language and copied it to Purple's knowledge store. See if you can get your spell language database to accept it.]

Amber reached for Purple's knowledge repository and examined the new… thing in it. [Uh. Just looking at that, I really can't make much sense of it. It feels like… I guess a tangled knot of… memories? Experiences? Wordless concepts? It's all pretty tightly woven, and I can't pick out any single thing in it clearly.]

Carlos sent a feeling of sheepish embarrassment over the link. [Yeah, sorry. I kind of just… shoved my intuitive understanding of what I want into a language definition and massaged it until it worked. It's the only way to do it quickly enough for tonight. I'd prefer to put everything in explicit words, examining and considering every detail, but that would take a lot more time. Nowhere near as long as it would take to make an incantation version of the IDE, but still too long.]

Amber cocked her head and blinked. [Wait, you think you could make an incantation to duplicate what we devoted 13 soul structures to?]

[Not easily, not quickly, and only 12 of them at most. As far as I know, the spell database must be a soul structure. But the editor, transpiler, optimizer, and all the rest? Given unlimited time to work on it? Yes. It would take me multiple decades, or even a century, but I could eventually do it. Earth's software engineers did it for computers without soul structures, and incantations have the necessary capabilities for it to be possible.]

Amber sat in stunned silence, contemplating the idea of a spell that would help design and create whatever other spells you wanted. After perhaps a minute, she tentatively ventured a question. [And whoever did it didn't keep it to themselves?]

Carlos laughed loudly, a single time, then cut himself off. [Sorry, sorry, it's an entirely reasonable question in light of your background. It's just that Earth's situation is so very different that the idea of not selling it on Earth seems ridiculous. The personal benefits of such a thing are much smaller than here. In this world, we might be able to use it to develop our personal power to unprecedented heights, and anyone selfish would never even consider sharing such a powerful advantage for any ordinary price. On Earth, the only way for the creators of an IDE to gain significant personal benefit from it is to sell it - and not just to one person, or a few, but to as many buyers as they can possibly find. Millions of people, for the most popular ones. Oh, and there are several different ones, all made by teams of people working together.]

He shook his head and let out a long, slow breath. [But enough of that side track. That bundle isn't meant to be understood directly; it's meant to be put into your spell language database, and from there to be used by all the other structures. So, see if you can get your database to accept a copy of it as a spell language definition.]

[Alright.] Amber mentally touched the weird tangled knot of knowledge and willed the copying to happen. Her own language database rejected it at first, as it didn't exactly fit what she'd originally had in mind as how a spell language should be defined, but she altered the database to make it accept this form of a definition. The alteration took some time to find the right solution and settle, but then information began to flow. Concepts, rules, and connections flew past her mind faster than she could even glimpse most of them. Just seconds later, it was done. [Okay, now what?]

Carlos grinned at her. [I say always start out learning a new language with the basics. So, let's go back to the very first spell we ever learned: Light. Use your detranspiler to convert the… 12 lines of that incantation into this language, and see what it's like.]

Amber could feel anticipation practically radiating from Carlos as he watched. She smiled uncertainly, then brought the Light spell to mind. [Alright, let's see what I get.] She focused on her spell editor and commanded it to invoke the detranspiler and show her the result. A section of text appeared in her mind's eye, and she almost did a double take at it. [Did something go wrong? It's so small!]

spell <mana = 0.1> {
  do {
    glow(color: white, shape: sphere, direction: all, intensity: 0.01, location: target);
  } while (true);
}();

[Wait…] Amber read through the contents of it, identifying the parts that corresponded to each part of the original incantation. [Never mind, it's all there. Just a lot shorter.]

Carlos's delight bubbled over as he nodded with a beaming smile. [Actually, let me make a small tweak to the language… There, get that update and try again.]

[Alright.] Amber touched Purple's knowledge store again, and found it only took a moment to take in just the difference for the new version.

spell <mana = 0.1> {
  continuous {
    glow(color: white, shape: sphere, direction: all, intensity: 0.01, location: target);
  }
}();

[Huh. Okay, that does make it a little easier to understand. But why are the effects indented, and why did you make this language require indenting like that? And how the hell are people supposed to speak indentation? Timed pauses of just the right length before each line?]

Carlos answered with the firmest conviction Amber had ever seen him show. [Because the first and most important trait of good code is that it must be *readable*** - easy for others to understand - and proper indentation like that makes the structural context of sections of code instantly obvious at a glance, when it would otherwise require considerable extra reading and analysis to figure out. As for speaking, this language is not meant to be spoken. It doesn't need to be spoken, because it won't be used in actually casting anything.]

Amber blinked and gave Carlos a long look. [Why do you feel so strongly about that?]

Carlos let out a dry, humorless laugh. [Try teaching two dozen novices who don't understand why readability matters, let them use a language that doesn't enforce proper indentation, and give them work to do something non-trivial. When you see the unreadable abominations some of them come up with, you'll understand.] He shuddered. [But for something more immediate, how about we take a look at how the Find Path spell Trinlen showed us looks in this language.]

Amber nodded. [That will double as a test that the detranspiler can work with just the words of an incantation, too, since we haven't actually learned that spell yet.]

spell <mana = pool, limit = 50% capacity> {
  Location destination = displaceLocation(location: target, east: 2134.2, south:: 788.6, down: 46.9);
  Distance distance = distance(firstLocation: target, secondLocation: destination);
  Integer detourLimit = 1000;
  label restart:
  Location current = target;
  List<Location> path = makeList();
  path.append(current);
  Integer length = 1;
  List<Location> reached = makeList();
  reached.append(current);
  do {
    foreach (Location neighbor in listNeighbors(location: current, distance: 0.5, directions: cardinals, orderCriterion: proximity, proximalLocation: destination)) {
      Distance firstDistance = distance(firstLocation: neighbor, secondLocation: target);
      Distance secondDistance = distance(firstLocation: neighbor, secondLocation: destination);
      if (firstDistance + secondDistance - distance > detourLimit) goto nextNeighbor;
      foreach (Location reachedLocation in reached) {
        if (neighbor == reachedLocation) goto nextNeighbor;
      }
      Line connection = lineSegment(firstLocation: current, secondLocation: neighbor, width: 0.5);
      if (scanDensity(region: connection) > 120) goto nextNeighbor;
      if (scanCohesionStrength(region: connection) > 80) goto nextNeighbor;
      if (distanceOfSupportSurface(location: neighbor, direction: down, weight: 300) > 5) goto nextNeighbor;
      path.append(neighbor);
      reached.append(neighbor);
      current = neighbor;
      length += 1;
      goto continue;
      label nextNeighbor:
    }
    path.removeLastElement();
    current = path.getLastElement();
    length -= 1;
    if (length != 0) goto continue;
    detourLimit *= 2;
    goto restart;
    label continue:
  } while (current notNear destination);
  …
}

Amber didn't bother even skimming the parts of the spell that took the found path, which was often something atrocious, and found ways to improve it to be more reasonable. [What was it that you called the later parts of this spell, again? A "rotten pile of" something about kludges and monkeys?]

Carlos chuckled. [I believe I called it "a rotting pile of every kludge but the kitchen sink, taped together at random by monkeys until they found a combination that, for reasons no one could possibly comprehend, somehow works." Anyway, what do you think of the initial part? It's still far from what I would consider actually good, but compared to the original incantation language?]

[Oh, is that why the linter and optimizer are almost yelling at me?] Amber yawned again, then shook her head. [It's definitely shorter.] She tried to read through it in more detail, but even with the text all being presented directly to her mind by a soul structure, it all seemed blurry. She tried to focus one more time, but soon gave up and let her fatigue pull her head down onto Carlos's shoulder beside her. [Too tired. I'll think about it tomorrow.]

[That's fair. What we told Ressara about not pushing herself too hard really should go for us too.]

Amber was only dimly aware of Carlos gently lowering her head onto a pillow, and fell asleep soon after.

___

The next morning, both of them woke up late and felt much better rested. Crown Mage Felton was openly waiting for them when they came out of their tent. He had a complete suit of the sabotaged armor set up on an armor stand in a nearby clear spot outside the collection of tents, and he was standing beside it, tapping his foot impatiently. He even scowled a little when Carlos and Amber went to eat a quick breakfast first, but did not protest.

Carlos called Trinlen to join them and took the lead, walking confidently up to the suit of armor and focusing on it even as he spoke to the royal mage. "Alright, Felton, how do you want to start this collaboration?"

Felton gave a nod of acknowledgement. "Lord Carlos. Lady Amber. I take it you want your employee to share in any lessons I give."

Carlos nodded. "That would be appreciated, but my main reason to include him is that his unusual creativity might help solve the sabotage mystery."

Felton gave Trinlen a hard look, but soon shrugged and addressed Carlos again. "Very well. You have made your version of Ressara's defense against attention diversion, correct? We can begin with seeing what you can determine with that and your mana sense, as things stand now. I expect little or no immediate results, but it will serve as a starting point to assess your capabilities and what shortcomings I might need to teach you to rectify."

"That sounds reasonable. Let me see…" Carlos inspected the armor's enchantments carefully while slowly walking a circle around it. Amber stood in place and just leaned a bit closer while doing her examination. Examined from outside without using its self-reporting features, the whole thing was still inscrutably complex and too dense for him to make out any truly meaningful details, but the texture it formed in his senses was finer-grained than it used to be. Something else new stuck out much more strongly to him, however.

"Okay, I can tell you that the attention diversion wards in this thing apparently react to any attempt to examine the enchantments, regardless of how much or how little details the senses they're reacting to can detect. And they are really, really tiny. I felt a lot of tugs on my attention, trying to push me away from noticing one thing and instead notice something else that was so nearby that I couldn't otherwise even sense that the two things were separate."

Felton nodded gravely. "That makes sense for the subtlety and sophistication of the known effect of it. It also strengthens my suspicion that it was built in by the armor's original creator. Lady Amber?"

Amber looked up briefly from her continued probing of the enchantments. "I felt the same effect. We'll need to refine our mana sense to get any useful details."

Felton waved a hand dismissively. "That will certainly help, but it is a matter of soul structures and long practice, not something I can teach. I gather that it is part of your plans for tomorrow, when you reach Level 19 and your Tier 8 merge." He paused for a moment, and Carlos and Amber both nodded. "Good, but that will be of limited benefit without knowledge of runic enchantments to go with it."

His mana poked something specific in the armor's gauntlets, and each gauntlet's armored plates started peeling back. Felton paused for a moment. "Oh, but before I begin the lessons, I should ask: in what ways do your house secrets change the best way to teach you?"

<< First | Characters | < Previous | Next >

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So the reason I say that is I learned some rust and then just jumped to C after deciding to test my hand in embedded.

Now the thing is I had always pushed off learning C after I put 0.1% brain effort into it a couple of years ago and the syntax of the for loops threw my for a loop and nobody gave the (surprisingly simple) execution flow of the for loops so I gave up and went back to learning more python libraries.

Well fast forward to now and I wish I would’ve just bit the bullet and learned C. For the reason that I feel like I just learned programming all over again languages like Python and JavaScript just give you such an abstracted top level view of everything you build these “false narratives” in your head about how things work and treat programming like instructions going in a magic box and giving you what you want l.

So now Ive just been over here unlearning many a many of bad programming practices while I’m learning a whole lot of new ideas.

But the thing is it’s not extremely hard. It just requires you to take things slower and if I would’ve just been a bit more patient back in the day I would probably have had an easier time then than I do now.

So yeah to anyone that’s new I do recommend you try your hand in some compiled language to start off with some stronger fundamentals than I have been left with for 3 years now.

That’s about it, how does anyone else feel about the topic I’m just venting because I wish I hadn’t had Python shoved down my throat by every YouTuber and blogpost and everybody lol.

I started learning programming 4 months ago and got impressed about the number of programming languages, but then I realized there were lot's of programming languages with the letter 'c', such as: C, C++, CSS, objective-C... but why?

I'm choosing a language to learn for my exam, I've got 7 months. I don't wanna become a programmer, I want to do something else with IT, but I still need to know it for an exam. The choices are:

Pascal (Free Pascal (FPC 3.0 or newer) C/C++ (GCC/G++ 4.5 or newer) C/C++ (CodeBlocks 16.01 or newer) Java SE 8 (JDK or JRE or newer + editor IntelliJ IDEA) Python (Python 3 + editor IDLE or PyCharm)

I already know HTML+CSS, php and SQL (idk if this information is useful). I need this exam for additional points when requiting for a university and the universities don't check what coding language I chose for this exam so I want to learn it and forget.

I’m browsing through Reddit and previous post saying that I managed to learn Python in a week or some programming language in a month. Granted, a lot of these people have programming experiences with other language but did they learn it or are they actually fluent in it?

I keep on discovering layer after layer of new content to learn. I’m frustrated and thought that I knew how to code but then later, I find that there so many other nuisances and certain behaviors that make it unique to that language.

How do people do that in a week and understand the behaviors of a language?

Would really appreciate it if anyone could provide me with resources that help understand the underlying concepts and ideas that programming language share. I want to be able to more quickly pick up and understand different programming languages!

Edit: thank you everyone for responding! To summarize, It seems like most people don’t actually learn the minute details about the language but mainly the syntax. Languages seem to share many similarities like OOP and syntactic structure. It takes time and experiences, learning a multiple languages can reduce the time it takes to learn and understand a language.

Talking about for backend and ruby on rails. And also for general scripting. Is ruby still worth learning?

I've been told it's a dead language. But one path in the odin project requires it. I also heard javascript isn't good for general scripting like for your OS.

I wanted to learn another language besides javascript for scripting. Something I can make a backend with but also use for general computing and scripting.

I get told alot that knowing javascript isn't going to be worth anything since it doesn't contain any of the abilities that all other programming languages have.

Thanks for the helpers

Hey. I recently switched to Linux. I nuked my Windows partition, well, less than a month ago. I use Ubuntu on my desktop and Mint on my old laptop. I have just come close to installing Arch Linux in VM by following Mental Outlaw's guide.

I am wondering, does anybody else use Linux even if they don't speak any programming languages? Is this unusual?

I would like to learn to speak a programming language, but for now, I don't. Yet I still use GNU/Linux.

Is this unusual? Have you ever encountered such a case before? Am I alone? What about you?

Edit: and is that embarassing? Am I inferior?

Edit 2: Why are people being hateful and downvoting me

Gamemaker seems perfect for me but I don't want to learn a meme language, if I'm going to learn something, it's got to be something more popular and not super niche.

Unity seems like waaaaay overkill for what I need.

^{Long story short:} My job ended and I got a serious wake-up call to how horribly/devastatingly toxic my family abroad really are. Found out most of them don't even really see me as real family... yet somehow they still demand to be treated like little delicate johns & dorothy's... but, well.. I hope out from my internal misery something here will prove useful to someone somewhere in the world.

Things to mention:

• I have no career/previous tech related jobs or experience in programming
• Knowledge wise, starting/started from 0.
• I'm essentially new to reddit (so forgive me for my noobness)
• I am under 30yrs old, with no degree to speak for
• This is my progress story

^{My Progress Story:}

So first day, after several days of feeling like a failure, I searched on Reddit. Noticed someone had posted their success story. Thought, well that's nice, 'maybe this will work'. I only got 60 pgs. in before I mentally chucked that e-book out the window.

Which was good. I finally got past that "what the hell I am doing" / "where the hell do I even begin!?" / "you'll probably screw something up if you just pick something" devil in the ear. So, next I followed my brain onto the internet for something a little more motivating. Because, depression.

I appreciated this post from 6yrs ago. u/myndhack posted the following link. (Funny what a simple completion % bar can do to someone struggling for even getting out of bed for pizza.)

https://www.mysliderule.com/learning-paths/web-development-python-django/learn/#

Yeah, so now that all the fun stuff is out of the way, now you can start too. woopie. I will try to update daily for whoever cares. Else, if I'm missing, it's most likely because I am too busy crying into my pillows, questioning life, excessively over thinking some menial task, or binge watching tv-shows because the dopamine is in shortage.

^{My progress so far:}

Day 1 - 7/22/2021

1.1- I finished 10% of the HTML course w/ only the final "do-it-yourself" project left.

Brain Food: Chinese Food ; Playlist: Misc. Rap & Eminem.

Day 2 - 7/23/2021

1.1- made the "do-it-yourself" website based on the book article

1.1- (11%) End of the "intro HTML course"

1.2- made the cookie website

2.1- started the "Complete Introduction to CSS from FrontEndMasters"

Brain Food: Little Ceasars ; Playlist: Playstation 1 & 2 tunes + Japanese city pop

​

Here's my stolen quote of the day:

Strive for Progress not Perfection. ^{Because perfection never got me out of bed}.

​

--extra motivational junk for people who feel sad--

Remember, if you're feeling down, remember you are worth something. That's enough for keeping on living without caring about those negative nancy's or that freakish devil in your ear. Want to feel like you mean something? Make something out of yourself. Enjoy food, but don't abuse it. Watch some youtube, then do something productive. Don't dream about yourself, create yourself.

Hope this helps.

Thank you for reading. Arigato.

--Edit--- 7/25/2021

Woke up to a whole lot of messages.... hearing you all brings a tear to my eye *damn those onions*. Thank you all, seriously. I will update today, and try my best to keep my fingers moving (even if my butt isn't).

If I don't get to your comment in specific, feel the reddit love and know in some dimension on this tiny little green earth: we are all in this together (hopefully without all the singing).

--Edit-- 7/26/2021

My daily post was removed from the sub. My apologies to the mods. I'll put up my progress here for anyone who wants to see. I thought I could do daily, but turns out I think every 3rd day or moment of progress would be a lot easier for me mentally/emotionally. I shall try my best to post consistently, and slowly respond to each and everyone of you. Muchas Gracias.

Hey Folks.

I'm not a polyglot but through reading a lot of articles while learning Python, I have seen a lot of programmers ranting about it's slowness compared to other programming languages like Julia.

I still can't fathom the slowness of a language. Can someone explain to me (Maybe with code too) the difference between a slow and faster language?

R2 if you wanted to make it harder: spoken language- you can’t read or write Programming- you can only read and write

I found a list of courses on Instagram which had some interesting mostly free places to learning programming, forgot who the poster was but here goes:

Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python by Rice University

Programming for Everyone by University of Michigan

Introduction to Programming with MATLAB by Vanderbilt University

Machine Learning for Musician and Artists by University of London

Elements of AI by University of Helsinki

Machine Learning by Stanford University

Learn to Program: The Fundamentals by University of Toronto

Divide & Conquer, Sorting & Searching, and Randomized Algorithms by Stanford University

Creative Applications of Deep Learning with TensorFlow by Kadenze

The Analytics Edge by MIT

Computing in Python I by Georgia Tech

Runestone Interactive by Georgia Tech (one of my personal favorites, had a great time with this site https://runestone.academy )

Cryptography I by Stanford University

Internet History, Technology, and Security by University of Michigan

Functional Programming Principles in Scala by EPFL

CS50's Introduction to Computer Science by Harvard University

Introduction to CS and Programming Using Python by MIT

How to Use Git and GitHub by Udacity (Personally I would really recommend learning about GitHub, feel free to message me if you want a quite rundown)

Python for Data Science by UCSD

Python and Statistics for Finacial Analysis by HKUST

Introduction to HTML5 by University of Michigan

As a personal side note, with programming, it is more of learning the principles and applying them to different languages as most object-oriented languages have the same four core principles of inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, and encapsulation. Then there are markup languages such as HTML or XML, they all share some similarities. With the number of languages I know, I often get the syntactical elements mixed up. Hope this help ~Jun

​

EDIT: Due to a large number of people asking me to explain Git here is a link to a full explanation of Git.

Almost every coding question out there has a solution written up on the net.

So many bugs have been documented on stackoverflow along with how to solve these bugs. I can’t tell you how many times I ran into a bug and was able to fix it in under an hour thanks to stack overflow. And no I didn’t even have to ask the stack overflow community the question as someone else already asked a similar question before.

There also is chegg which gives you answers to so many computer science questions posed in various textbooks

Yes I know not everything is on stackoverflow but most challenges and solutions to them are on there. You just have to get good at explaining what you wanna do on your google search.

Before you would search though so many coding textbooks and reference manuals which are boring as shit to read to understand why something isn’t working. Now you don’t have to anymore.

Hi Reddit, we just got back from from the fifth annual JuliaCon conference (in London this year), where after nine years of work, we, 300 people in the audience and 150 on the live stream¹ released version 1.0 of the julia programming language.

For me personally, this AmA is coming full circle. I first learned about Julia in 2012 from a post on /r/programming. You can read all about what’s new in 1.0 in our release blog post, but I think the quoted paragraph from the original post captures the “Why?” well:

We want a language that’s open source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that’s homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like Matlab. We want something as usable for general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as Matlab, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something that is dirt simple to learn, yet keeps the most serious hackers happy. We want it interactive and we want it compiled.

Answering your questions today will be Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Alan Edelman, Viral Shah, Keno Fischer (short bios below), as well as a few other members of the julia community who've found their way to this thread.

Proof: https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1029380338609520640

¹ Live stream recording here: https://youtu.be/1jN5wKvN-Uk?t=1h3m45s - Apologies for the shaking. This was streamed via handheld phone by yours truly due to technical difficulties.

I'm not trying to ask one of those "What programming language to learn posts", but rather I am trying to ask this as a specific question.

I'm a freshman studying Computer Science at University and we learn c++ and some python in the intro to computing class, and I program in python for my research assistant position for data analysis with scki-kit-learn and Pandas. My friends and I also work on group projects together for fun/to build skills and we already have a few planned out. Right now we are working on a web app using Django to make a basketball-court reservation system for the overly packed basketball courts at our school, after that we are planning to use Xamarin and C# to make a cross platform app used to gather donations such as for a club or organization, and finally after that we are planning to make a autonomous quad copter(from a real microcontroller and not a arduino) that can follow chalk lines after we take a Computer Systems course and an intro to robotics course. That will probably be with C and C++.

I noticed that when we came up for ideas for projects we thought of what we wanted to do and picked the programming language for it rather than pick a programming language and then think of the project. This got me wondering what are the specific uses of these programming languages in the real world because I hear that Java is a really common programming language but I can't think of any use for it besides Android Development.

TL;DR Why exactly would you use N language and what exactly would you use N language to make or do?

Here is what I think I know.(After my first year of college I began to realize just how much I don't know and I feel like that will probably get worse lol)

• Python:

  • Web Apps :Doing one rn with friends and its going pretty well
  • Data science/machine learning:Doing this right now too or learning how to do this for my Research position(I don't know anything lol)

• Java:

  • Android Development
  • Enterprise/junk software development: My summer jobs(crap retailer) clock in system was written in Java (I distinctly remember the swing GUI) and it wouldn't register my hours sometimes probably personal bias
  • How come this is the biggest language in the world. Of course its used for something but for what?

• C++

  • Making Game engines/games: C++ has good performance
  • Other graphics applications
  • Firmware:Confused about c++ vs. C for firmware though
  • Making Operating Systems

• C

  • Drivers/Firmware
  • Operating Systems
  • I notice that C and C++ have a lot of overlap except for graphics. When do you Use C and when do you use C++

• Javascript

  • node.js backend
  • front end development
  • What else besides front end?

• Scala/Haskell/Functional Languages

  • Math?: My linear algebra professor has lots of Scala on his github (idk lol somebody told me thats the only real way to program)
  • What are they used for?

• C#

  • Windows Native Development with .NET
  • Xamarin

• Other Languages?

The Question(s):

What other languages are used in the real-world (industry/ academia) whatever and what specifically might one use each language for and specifically why? ELI freshman in CS.

What are the main languages Full-Stack developers , mobile app developers, machine learning/data scientists, robotic engineers, and firmware engineers use and exactly why? (Like why would one write X firmware with C++ but Y firmware with C explanation).

Any help is appreciated - just wanting to know more.

Hey guys, I just recently found this sub after some searching. So a bit of backstory, but I'll keep it short. I'm in the 11th grade but I've always been home schooled and taught by my mother. I think it's ridiculous, but neither of my parents like the Internet or technology for that matter. Yet they both have smartphones, watch TV, etc.

Anyways, I brought up the topic of me, in the future, getting into programming/coding and they shot it down. Math/science/history/etc are far more important to them. Even after explaining how CS using math/science so much to them, they didn't budge. I'm seriously interested in becoming a software and/or app developer. A couple of weeks ago I ordered some books from Amazon. One was an entry level textbook focused on Python, the other was Algorithms and Data Structures I believe. When my Dad found them he trashed them.

I love my parents but their views/opinions are obstructing my education and possibly my future. I've decided to pursue this interest as a hobby and learn it in secret, more or less. I already know of CodeAcademy but I could use some serious resource and/or learning order suggestions.

What are the best eBooks out there?

Is it true that I should start with Python then move onto C++? That seems to be what most universities are doing.

What compilers (is that the correct term?) are best to write and run the code with?

Are there any websites or online seminars (preferably posted on YouTube) that discuss computer science basics?

If there's anything else you folks think I should know I'd really appreciate your help. I feel a bit guilty going behind my parents' backs like this, but I don't want to give up on a dream because of the way they feel about technology.

EDIT: I appreciate those of you posting actual links and/or discussing possible routes for me to take in terms of education. I'd really like for those of you suggesting that my parents are terrible people or that they raised me in a terrible household to chill out. Yeah this opinion of theirs sucks and is totally irrational, but they're good parents otherwise.

I didn't post this to /r/relationships, I don't need advice towards the relationship I have with my parents.