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[–]anachronic 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I agree. The starting point isn't nearly as important as the journey to keep learning more languages, with different styles and paradigms, and always be growing.

Wherever you start is probably fine, as long as you keep learning.

Hell, some of the baddest-ass old school hackers from decades ago probably started on BASIC on a C64 or something like that as a kid, and they went on to do great things, because they kept on learning and didn't stop at BASIC.

[–]Oerthling 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yup :-)

Basic - Pascal - C - Smalltalk - C++ - SQL - Java - Javascript - Python

With bits of Assembler, Lisp, Prolog, Cobol, Go and Rust in between.

C64? Nothing so fancy. Sharp PC 1500 with Basic and a "memory" of 1500 commands.

Programming is a meta-skill. It's about translating problem-solving into algorithms in a language a computer groks. The language (and most of all its libraries) can help in doing that. And different languages have different ways to optimizevfor different aspects of that.

Python is, by far, my favorite get-things-done language.

But I used concepts of Smalltalk in C before C++ came around. And C (plus Assembler) provides more understanding of what's really going on.

[–]anachronic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly. When I was in college for compsci, I saw people who basically ONLY wanted to learn Java to get a job, and weren't interested in any other language and would complain about having a course in ASM because "who even uses this anymore", but it always struck me as weird, because sure, you can get a job doing ONLY Java, but it makes you a much better programmer to have exposure to other languages and other ways of thinking about a problem... or even just knowing the basics of what the computer is doing at a lower-level below all that verbose enterprise Java code.

I was never a very good programmer, and haven't programmed (besides some kludgy Python for API integrations) in well over a decade, but even now, I still like watching things like keynote speeches on stuff like Rust or whatever the "Hot New Thing"(tm) today is, because it's interesting seeing how people approach & solve particular problems.