What coding language should I start learning?

Question

I take computing science at school and I really enjoy it, I m doing pretty well. I m a girl and so many people are surprised, but usually impressed, when they hear I love the subject because I m not typically geeky but I like proving them wrong and want to learn more coding languages. Anyway, we code in Visual Basic and it s very basic, hence the name. I want to learn another language but I m not sure what to learn next or how to? I would love to be able to create an app on XCode but I wasn t sure how to start? The interface was quite confusing.

Answer 1

Instead of naming languages that I THINK you should learn, I'm going to ask you to question yourself.



What type of applications do you want to build? This is the golden question because if you want to build a webapp, learning C++ might not be the best way to go.



Do you want to build a webapp? Learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript, along with a server side technology like (node.js + express, python + django, java + spring, ruby on rails, etc). You should also try to learn a few front end frameworks too, like React, angular for advanced dom manipulation in javascript and foundation and bootstrap for css frameworks that allow you to quickly prototype a front-end for your site.



Do you want to build mobile applications? For iOS it's objective-c (going out the door, still useful because of legacy code though) and swift 2.0. For android it's java and XML. Nowadays, you can even build out mobile web apps with frameworks like Ionic and Touchstone.js that work on both devices (and you only need to learn HTML, CSS and JS which I would argue is much easier than Java or Objective-C). If your app doesn't require native features, try this method, you might enjoy it.



There are also various other programming domains like scientific (languages include R, python+numpy), Systems programming (c, c++, c#, java), game development (c++) and many more.



If I have to leave anything with this post, it's that I hope that you learn with some sort of motivation. Learning a language for no reason can be extremely dry and the material simply doesn't stick as well inside your head. By learning with a purpose, you will be constantly coming back.

Answer 2

I would start by learning JavaScript. It's based on C which is the grandfather of a lot of modern programming languages, but the entire JavaScript command set can be learned in a fairly short amount of time. Once you get the basics of how JS works, you'll be more prepared to tackle a bigger language such as C# because knowing JS will help you understand C# in a much shorter amount of time than if you were to just start tackling C# by itself. I would recommend CodeCademy.com's JavaScript course (linked below). It's fully interactive and makes learning JS a breeze.

Answer 3

You NEED to learn C+, C++, and/or C#. Those ideas are teh basic for language like Java

Answer 4

If you are using Xcode on a Mac you should learn Swift as that is where all the hot action will be for the next few years.



https://developer.apple.com/swift/resources/





There are loads of tutorials available...



http://www.raywenderlich.com/115478/video-tutorial-beginning-swift-2-series-introduction



and videos on YouTube....



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eP_xW-Zz34

Answer 5

Visual Basic was designed to be easily picked up and used, hence the name.

Answer 6

YOU ARE SO LIKE ME!!

People of this type are hard to find... :-/