What programming languages to learn (by order)?
What programming languages to learn (by order)?
Basic Come on, its in the name! Originally conceived as a teaching language, not much real-world use.
What are some of the best ways to learn programming?
What is a list of programming languages ordered from easiest to hardest to learn?
Most responses so far have focused on function-oriented languages, which are basically all the same. I have to explain the term function-oriented here: in this category I include imperative, functional, and object-oriented, since its straightforward to transform imperative and object-oriented code to strictly-evaluated functional style. The only popular exception to this is Haskell, where you have to express IO monadically.
Forth is an easier language, but its pretty much a low-level language relegated to embedded programming and the like.
However, one could argue that JavaScript is harder, sinceits a highly dysfunctional programming language.Jeff Walker calls it a minefield.You have to tread very carefully. You have to rely on JSLint or ESLint, lest you blow off your leg. And the language is growing into a frickin behemoth with the language spec for ES6 being three times bigger than for ES3!
Why is it so hard and frustrating for me to learn C programming? I cant pass my university exam. What am I doing wrong?
Easy to learn (to build things with):
Which is the easiest programming language to learn to develop android programs in the future?
A more interesting question is: why so. Based on my experience as software developer, things that most influence the easiness of a language are:
is easiest to learn. Heres why:
I have some experience from C, C, Python, JavaScript and Perl (ages ago, so Ill keep it out), and a little Haskell and Ruby more recently. These are the ones Ill compare.
Being able to tell the computer about fancy windows with buttons and text boxes and see them on the screen a minute after youve finished writing the code is clearly much more preferable to having to learn about a build tool, configuration files, package structure and a thousand other things (Java is nasty on that, even to seasoned developers).
Malbolge an esoteric programming language. Its
What are the 10 hardest programming languages?
Is Swift the easiest language to learn?
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Easy to learn (the language itself):
Is Google Go worth learning? What would the advantages be? Is it a fast language? How different is it compared to other languages, like Java o…
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Ruby wins marginally here because of its amazing live tutorial*. Ive hardly ventured beyond this though. I think Haskell is not that hard to get going with, but its learning curve past the basics is insanely steep.
SQL is related to both Prolog and array-oriented programming in this way: it is both declarative (you describe the solution and not the algorithm) and implicitly parallel. Most people dont have a lot of trouble with SQL because they never get very far into it.
notify you about that. That said, ironically, undefined behavior is well-defined, so its possible to learn about and avoid. Still, that adds learning complexity.
claim you know Python you need to know a few libraries as well, and library design isnt always consistent. So, long story short, theres simply a lot to learn.
From my university experience, two events stand out. One was a survey programming languages class, which consisted of implementing the same parser in Java, then Haskell, then Prolog. Haskell wasnt that big of a deal to most students, but Prolog was, because logic programming is completely unlike function-oriented programming, and you need a whole new mental model to reason about your program.
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, Ex-programmer, now hobbyist developer
That said, Id like to hear about psychologists/cognitivists on the topic, to know more about how people learn, how they learn programming languages and the language features that are related to this. I could find some possibly relevant titles on Google Scholar (eg,1,2,3), but an expert would be more helpful.
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Haskell you will fight with compiler a lot, also because Haskell tries to give you a lot of static guarantees, but not necessarily the same guarantees Rust does. Haskell is much easier if you have a math-y background and little to no (imperative) programming experience. Accomplished (imperative) programmers often struggle with Haskell because they need to break some preconceived stereotypes first. Still, Haskell is choke-full of very abstract concepts that might be hard to grasp at first. Google monads for an example. An intimidating list of language extensions complicates matters a bit as well.
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What are some of the best ways to learn programming?
The easiest language of any practicality is Smalltalk: seeSmalltalk and the Future of the Software Industry. It virtually has no syntax! All you need to understand is the concept ofmessage passingand youve got the syntax down pat.
The other one was a computer vision course, where the assignments were done in Octave (a Free Software Matlab clone). Octave is whats called an array-oriented language, the first of which was APL. Here you didnt have functions or loops, but had to think about compositions of operations on matrices, and the implicit parallelism of those operations. A lot of people had trouble with that.
of gotchas and inconsistencies, which you need to
specifically to be almost impossible to use or learn. Called after eighth circle of Hell in Dantes Inferno, which tells a lot about the general intent of its authors.
Rust you will fight with compiler a lot, because Rust tries to give you a lot of static guarantees. There are some unexpected things you might run into, but for the most part, its rather consistent and intuitive. Well, at least after you wrap your head around whole static guarantees thing.
Which programming language is the best to learn first, and which ones should I learn after? I want to learn from the easiest to the hardest la…
Which programming language is the best to learn first, and which ones should I learn after? I want to learn from the easiest to the hardest la…
. Basically, there are a few potholes in the language standard. If youre using any of that, which is undefined, compilers free to do whatever it wants, and in most cases it
Which is the most difficult programming language to learn and why?
Is Java the best and easiest programming language to learn?
Which programmer do you hire: the one who programs a messy program in three hours or the other who does a well-structured program in twelve?
Why is it so hard and frustrating for me to learn C programming? I cant pass my university exam. What am I doing wrong?
Which is the most difficult programming language to learn and why?
x86 assembly cant get much lower that that in terms of abstraction. What complicates matters is an ungodly amount of various extensions (to name a few, MMX, at least 4 versions of SSE, FPU, etc), and at least three distinct modes (16-, 32- and 64-bit), which all use different memory models and allow for different subsets of commands.
Which programmer do you hire: the one who programs a messy program in three hours or the other who does a well-structured program in twelve?
C its rather easy if were talking about learning the language, but theres this thing called undefined behavior that complicates matters
Im going to assume you care about serious programming languages, not esoteric, arcane nonsense like Brainfuck and Malbolge
49 are somewhat interchangeable, there isnt too much difference in complexity between those. Of these 6, some might argue that C is the hardest, but of those who would, most would point to manual memory management. Manual memory management isnt hard tolearn, its hard touse. Conceptually, it just amounts to allocate memory before use, free the memory youve allocated, dont use after freeing, dont try to free more than once. Actually doing all that without mistakes is rather hard, and compiler wont notify you if you make a mistake. Still, manual memory management isnt exclusive to C, and its not impossible tomess up even in garbage-collected languages, so I find this sentiment isnt justified.
What is, in your opinion, the hardest programming language to master, or excel at, and why?
The hardest language is probably C++ due to its vast array of features that are not orthogonal (and therefore have all kinds of unpredictable side effects).
JavaScript the base language is really simple, but there are
Is Swift the easiest language to learn?
, Used Fortran, Tandem TAL, C/C++, C, Obj-C, Java, Smalltalk, Python, GoWhat are the easiest and hardest programming languages to learn?
Clear, close to English syntax, which is verbose enough. For learners if then else is easier than: expr ? expr : expr (PERL or Bash are rather difficult mainly because of that).
Python its very easy to learn the base language. But to
You mightve noticed that theres only one functional language in the list, namely, Haskell. I mightve mentioned OCaml, Scala and F, too, but Im not as familiar with either of those, so I dont feel Im qualified to comment on their learning complexity. All of these 3 have object-oriented parts to worry about, while Haskell does not, so its an open question whether they are harder to learn than Haskell or not. I would argue that adding objects from object-oriented programming into the type system makes type system more complicated, and thus harder to learn. On the other hand, Haskell is often more abstract, and some people have a bit of a hard time with that.
Therefore, I would nominate Javascript as the easiest-to-learn programming language, simply because there is no setup hassle. You can open up a Javascript console in your web browser right now, and start writing code. If you know HTML too, you can create GUIs easily. Javascripts dynamic typing and first-class functions make it easy to learn a variety of programming concepts without getting bogged down in details, and there is a wide variety of online tutorials and tools to help you along.Is this answer still relevant and up to date?The feedback you provide will help us show you more relevant content in the future.
For those just learning to program, I would say that the biggest obstacle is not the language itself, but setting up the programming environment, configuring things, wrestling with IDEs… theres a lot that can break when using an IDE to write Java or C++ or even Ruby, and its frustrating to have things not work even when you know your code is correct, simply because something isnt configured right.
Java also very similar to Python in terms of complexity, but arguably a bigger collection of libraries to be aware of.
What defines easy to learn? When I started programming, all I wanted was to build things, which is not the same as just learning the language, yet few will learn a language without a desire to learn to build things with it. Ill try to give a list of both.
standard library, that horrible thing called undefined behavior inherited from C, and quite a bit of new stuff being introduced with each new standard, and you get yourself a language thats unintentionally very hard to learn.
Static type checking and declaration enforcement are good things in production contexts, but less good for a learner, so you need some balance (one reason why Python is loved more than Java).
. C++ is basically three distinct languages you need to be aware of: preprocessor, C++ itself, and template metalanguage; all three use different syntax; all three have their own gotchas. There are a lot of frankly weird things in C++ standard as well, many of which (but not all) are historical accidents. As a consequence, C++ is full of often unintuitive rules you need to
Being coherent and clean, not a heap of different things, paradigms, programming approaches, resulting from years of different trends thrown into an existing language (I think thats one of the main reasons why C++ or PERL are considered difficult, and why PHP is considered dangerous for making large projects).
Im not willing to provide one more list. Pretty clearly, languages like Python, Visual Basic or the old Pascal are easy to learn (I would add Scratch, despite being very different and mostly educational) and others like C, C++, Haskell are hard (I would add PERL and Bash scripting).
Ruby, Python, JavaScript, C, C, Haskell
Go very similar to Python in terms of learning complexity, although library design is generally somewhat more consistent. Might be a bit harder to learn though, mostly due to masquerading as a low-level language when its really not, so theres a bit of a disconnect sometimes.
Pascal Also a teaching language, also not much real-world use. A little more concepts to learn than with Basic.
Well, its rather hard to say objectively which languages are easier or harder to learn, and different people might find different languages harder. Still, therearesome candidates on being objectively hard. So, listing only languages I am aware of, from easiest to hardest (subjectively, of course):
Are web languages the easiest to learn?
PHP could be close to Python in terms of complexity, but PHP is much less consistent than Python. Newer versions are better, but are backwards-compatible, which means theres still a lot of frankly weird stuff in the language, and a lot of horrifying code floating around.
What are the 10 hardest programming languages?
, similar to undefined behavior in C, but not as well defined. Also, lately, a lot of frankly unnecessary syntax was added in new standards, so youll have to learn that as well (with all the gotchas that come with that, and there are a few)
What is, in your opinion, the hardest programming language to master, or excel at, and why?
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C wins this for me simply because of its beautiful and visual coding support tools and meaty standard library**. Python also comes with allot of great libraries, but the coding tools I feel leave some to be desired. I might put Haskell last because Ive not learned it properly (but I must must add though, that I have GREAT faith in functional languages like Haskell for the future). Ive kept Ruby out since I cannot place it.
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