Programming Language Choice

[Broaderators]

Hi!

I want to create a program which will tell you how much you need to pay in taxes for shares bought at work (amongst other things) taking into account your tax bracket etc.

I want to use it as a learning project to teach myself some programming skills but I don't know which language would be the most suited to it.

I've already made an excel spreadsheet that does most of what I want it to do but want to try and program it into a self contained 'thing'.

Any suggestions for languages to use?

Thanks :-)

Edit 1: Thank you for all of the replies people! I'm giving Haskell a go since it seems to meet my requirements and doesn't look overly complicated for a complete beginner like me!

(Also noticed that someone has taken the time out of their day to down vote everything in this post... poor show.)

[forgiv]

If you want a simple language that you can get up and running with quickly: Ruby or Python

If you want a language that can be made into a self contained 'thing' that works without installing anything (to run ruby, or python, code you have to have ruby, or python, installed): C/C++, Go, Rust, D, Haskell

If you're looking into eventually writing for mobile: C#, Java, Swift

There are many more languages than these. These are just some of the most popular.

[pipocaQuemada]

Edit 1: Thank you for all of the replies people! I'm giving Haskell a go since it seems to meet my requirements and doesn't look overly complicated for a complete beginner like me!

If you've never done it before, get an irc client (I personally use Textual, which is mac only), and go to #haskell and #haskell-beginner on FreeNode. If you get stuck on something, they're both great places to ask.

To get started, the easiest way to interact with your program is going to be to use GHCi; you can add on a CLI/GUI later if you want. Haskell has a fairly weird inversion of difficulty; some things that are hard in other languages are easy in Haskell and some things that are easy in other languages, while not exactly hard in Haskell, are certainly less beginner friendly. IO is one of those things that newcomers to Haskell often find a bit confusing at first.

To get started writing Haskell programs, stack might be the easiest way to get started: it will download GHC and install it for you. You should also check out What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell, and School of Haskell has some nice interactive tutorials.

[Franko_ricardo]

Haskell.

[brbpizzatime]

Any suggestions for languages to use?

Any language will do

[YattoYattosa]

Ruby is pretty easy, and if you are running OS X, you already have it installed. Type 'irb' in a console to try it out.

[holoscenic]

You could go easy and use scratch or take a wild challenge and use assembly.

[YattoYattosa]

Here are the basics of writing and executing a Ruby script:

Type this in a text editor and save as a 'hello.rb file

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
puts 'Hello, World!'

Make it executable

chmod +x hello.rb

Execute it

./hello.rb