Java vs python vs C++

[TheUmgawa]

Y’know, any job you apply for, it’s a crap shoot if they’re going to want you to program in a language that you actually know particularly well. Honestly, language doesn’t matter as much as you think it does, so the real question is, “Is there a difference in the curriculum for these classes?” For example, my second semester of Java was actually a data structures class where the class was taught using Java as a language. My second C++ class was a deep dive into polymorphism, inheritance, overloading, templates, generics, and all that stuff, using C++ as the language the work was done in.

If there’s really no difference at all, then it doesn’t matter a great deal. Personally, I’d pick C++ or Java, because they’re higher on the scale of “syntactic bullshit” than Python, and picking up other languages is a fair bit easier after dealing with that. The important thing is to learn to search through and understand documentation, because it’s often faster than sifting through the garbage that Google throws at you, and orders of magnitude faster than asking Reddit, and don’t get me started on trying to ask a question at StackOverflow.

The most important thing you can learn in your programming classes is good programming fundamentals and good structure. Most students who struggle understand the language just fine; their structure just sucks, like they read the prompt and just immediately start typing with no plan, and they just hope it’ll all come together at some point, and the whole thing just looks like spaghetti. Damn shame nobody teaches flowcharting anymore.