COBOL!
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Programming
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COBOL is pretty easy to learn and has lots of syntactic sugar to make programming easier. I’ve heard that it’s still in demand as big Enterprise is running out of first generation coders, but I don’t know how long that demand will last. Ada is another language that people joke about but is in demand in certain circles, particularly military.
Beyond any of the basics (logic, loops, data types, functions, classes etc), my biggest tip is to come up with a project, and figure out how you want to do it.
Like, you could make a "local weather display".
This could be purely JavaScript, CSS and HTML, and it runs on a raspberry pi.
Or you could go down an embedded route, use an Arduino, program in c/c++ (even python, node, or rust).
Or perhaps you want to make a game, and use c#.
Or some mobile apps, using swift for iOS... Or kotlin for android. Or a language that can compile for both.
Maybe you just want to automate some things on Linux, and some bash scripts are just the ticket.
I would suggest learning the basics of programming using JavaScript/node, python or c#.
Then figure out a project, and make it happen.
tryruby.org
Give it a shot.
Python, JavaScript, or (if you have a Mac) maybe Swift.
(Probably not Java or C++. They're too big.)
But really it doesn't matter much. CS snobs used to say that "BASIC causes brain damage" but a whole generation of programmers proved that to be wrong. The important part is to keep going and not stop. After you learn one language, learn another. There's no such thing as a good programmer who only knows one language.
Just ask ChatGPT since it's going to be doing most of the programming from here on out anyway.
Kidding sort of. But Python is pretty great if you want to quickly be able to do stuff. C/C+ is good if you want to really understand more of what is actually happening on the machine.