choosing a language for learning

EmcD123

I've just started college and am doing computer science for first year. We're learning python and I'm well on top of it and kinda bored if I'm honest so I was considering learning a second language at the same time.
I had ruby in mind as I have a nice interpreter on my nexus tablet for it and I believe I can use it to write android apps in ruby which would be interesting but there's so much choice out there that I don't want to start into something that potentially a dead end.
Don't suggest c languages or Java as theyre too time consuming to learn at this point in time. Or if you think it would be a bad idea to try to learn another alongside python then say that. I'm a bit unsure whether its actually a good idea.

Another thing holding my back from going straight into learning ruby is that despite all the good things I've heard about it I'm not entirely sure what I can do with it. Bear in mind I can find a book for just about any suggestion as I have access to the university library

IRLConor

If you're learning Python then you're not going to learn a hell of a lot extra by learning Ruby. If you're looking to challenge yourself and keep yourself occupied then you should learn something that is more different from Python than Ruby is. I know you're saying that C is too time consuming for you, but really if you want to learn another language picking something like C or a Lisp variant will give you a better insight into the practice of programming and will probably make you look at Python differently too.

If you just want to stretch yourself a little bit without taking up a chunk of time then I'd suggest trying to do something different from your college work but still within Python. Think of a project to tip away at during your spare time that does stuff that you're not going to touch in college.

L.Jenkins

IRLConor wrote: »

....If you just want to stretch yourself a little bit without taking up a chunk of time then I'd suggest trying to do something different from your college work but still within Python. Think of a project to tip away at during your spare time that does stuff that you're not going to touch in college.

You could get your hands on a Raspberry Pi with a few accessories and play around it.

CreepingDeath

I'd say HTML 5 and web development scripting.
A lot of the jobs these days require web development skills.

JQuery, angular.js, web sockets etc.

Talisman

You're potentially falling into a trap of thinking you know it all and setting yourself up to falter later on in the course. Programming courses start off at a remedial level because they assume the people haven't a clue and the purpose of the course is to give you a good grounding. Python is an easy language to start with but there are plenty of challenges for you to encounter and overcome using the language. Rather than look for a new language to learn take the opportunity to actually get to know Python and challenge yourself to solve problems using it.

Some libraries used in real-world applications:
Requests - the must have HTTP library.
Twisted - event-driven networking engine.
Beautiful Soup - screen scraping library.
Scrapy - screen scraping and web crawling.
Pattern - data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, network analysis and visualization.
Pillow - User friendly Python Image Library
SQLAlchemy - fully featured SQL abstraction.
SciPy - libraries for advance math, science and engineering applications.
PyGame - modules for writing your own games.

Take a library and learn it inside out by using it in your own projects. Review the code in the library to see how challenges were solved, this will give you insights into good practices in how the language should be used.

Write as much code as you can because it will stand to you in the long term.

When you have learned how to use Python then you will be ready to transition to another language. If you make the jump now, you are likely to fail to grasp nuances of Python or the new language which you choose.

EmcD123

Didn't get notifications about any of these replys. Anyway ya I'm aware that it gets harder as it goes along ,im studying it quite a bit and writing programs for stuff I come up against in other subjects as well to test myself. But my module is only till Christmas and is only 5 credits so its not going to reach a challenging level unless I keep it going for next year.

I do all my programming on my android tablet which is one of the main reasons I never attempted c++ or Java.

SonicWind

AIDE allows you to do java.