Which programming language should I learn?

[minestrone]

Core java as a sellable skill went out about 2001, to get by it in the market you will have to have some knowledge of the various servers, frameworks, IDEs and toolkits going about just now, and that probably numbers about 30 or 40 'other things'.

Seriously consider python. Good money being made and not exactly hard to learn, bit of the 'frontier' thing going for it just now.

[OwlHoot]

:::

Python is definitely growing in demand and worth a look.

C++ and Java are still widely used and worth learning.

PHP - massive demand for this. Still sneered upon as not being a proper programming language but it is very flexible now and is very powerful in the right hands.

Personally would look at PHP if you want to web dev due to the amount of jobs out there for it, then C++ or Java if you are more of a programmer than a web developer. ...

There are two slight problems with PHP.

Although Admin is right that there's massive demand for it, so you'd never be short of contract opportunities, the rates are rubbish, rarely more than £250 per day compared with typically £350 a day for perl in the same conditions and maybe £450 per day for Java and C++.

Also, although more than adequate for the job it does, it retains some of its mickey mouse origins in that its code checking isn't nearly as rigorous (*) as say Java or even perl. You want a language that can protect you as far as possible from your own mistakes, even at the cost of some extra drudgery in type definitions etc; otherwise you'll spend longer bug hunting, and miss more latent bugs.

(*) or wasn't the last time I contracted with v5 about three years ago, unless they've since added some "--ultra-stickler" flag.

[d000hg]

If you learn Python you can work for Sasguru

[doodab]

I would go with C# or Java. Both are in widespread commercial use, can be used for web app development, and will get you used to curly brackets without having to worry about what (*func)(char*, int**) means or all the ways it can go wrong.

On the other hand learning C or C++ properly will entail gaining a level of insight into what is actually going on that you won't get from any of the others.

You will find perl scripts everywhere, so it's worth knowing a bit, but I doubt it would get you a job these days.

The others are very popular in the open source world but less so in big companies, at least that is my perception.

I'm not sure building a web crawler is quite the same thing as web development though.

[VectraMan]

If you've done VB and SQLServer it's not going to be that big a jump for you to get into doing C# and SQL Server.

C++ with respect, isn't for amateurs. It was the default choice for everything in the 90s, but these days has become more of a specialist tool, and nobody that's doing high-end C++ work is going to hire somebody who's spent a couple of weekends reading a book. And the people that were doing low-end C++ work have moved to doing C# or Java.

[OwlHoot]

.. nobody that's doing high-end C++ work is going to hire somebody who's spent a couple of weekends reading a book. ...

True if it's a main requirement; but home dabbling might be enough to swing a contract your way if you can answer a couple of techy interview questions and the C++ is just a nice to have

Same applies to a lot of things, obviously.

[VectraMan]

home dabbling might be enough to swing a contract your way if you can answer a couple of techy interview questions and the C++ is just a nice to have

Q1: How do you fix the syntax error in this, what does it mean, and why should you never do it?

(*func)(*char, **int)

[NickFitz]

Python, with Django for the web dev aspects.

[Bwana]

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[doodab]

Q1: How do you fix the syntax error in this, what does it mean, and why should you never do it?

(*func)(*char, **int)

All the evidence you need that taking up Java turns your brain to mush