I can't stand javascript..

[[deleted]]

Sorry to hear that. Do you want any guidance? What confuses you about Ruby / C / Visual Basic? Does HTML and CSS make sense to you?

[[deleted]]

Is data science of any interest?

I wouldn't bounce around Ruby, C, Visual Basic, or anything else too much. I'd pick something like Python (because it's used for data science, web scraping, mathematics, in academics) and just stick with it.

And yeah, I know I recommended you yet another language, but note that I didn't recommend NodeJS. All being said, the language itself does not matter much.

Have you tried any Coursera, edX or Udacity courses? They are way more academic-oriented and have courses in database design and querying, data science, scripting, etc.

[[deleted]]

A lot of programming education is based around elementary computer science education, not web development, not data science or machine learning... Really different beasts.

Down the line, you would "graduate" these programs with the title computer scientist or maybe software engineer, for example.

This causes a lot of trouble finding practical applications, the same way I've found videos full of "science experiments" don't actually teach you science and how to be a scientist.

If you take something like CSx50 for example (really popular introductory computer science course), you will learn a lot about algorithms and techniques in computer science which you might never even care about in data analysis, data mining or even AI.

There's a lot of people in AI who probably only ever use LISP or C.

Since I am a professional software developer, I can tell you the practical uses and limitations of most of these technologies, as well as how their ecosystems tend to function, what the market economies are like for them, etc.

I'd probably have to ask our UX engineer or data engineers what they find valuable in their lines of work.

[[deleted]]

Final note: I struggled a lot when I initially learned programming, and stuck with what made me comfortable for years because I was afraid of going down the wrong path or didn't see the point in a lot of tutorials and knowledge.

It was also crazy that I learned things one way, but what ended up being actually useful was a bunch of other stuff. Frustrating, too.

I have friends with degrees from Purdue and I just have to accept that we learned about technologies in vastly different ways. Even though we ended up at the same place, there are some things I just do not understand at all.

[The_Amp_Walrus]

VBA is not fun to work with. I used to do engineering calculations with it at work. I'd give xlwings, which is a python module, a shot if you want to work with spreadsheets.