What programming language should i learn?

Question

Hey! Im new to Archlinux, and linux aswell. I have a friend, which make lots of cool stuff in Archlinux. He says he use c++ etc. I havent readed so much about Archlinux, so i wonder, where should i start? What is the easiest and coolest? Anyone want to tell me?
BTW: What language does "terminal" use?
Could you add a tutorial link too, which YOU mean is a good tutorial?
I really hope for an answer, aswell this is my first post on this forum.
Have a good day.
Kim

Answer 1

Don't start with programming. Move that to your medium-term to long-term goals. If you've just switched to Linux, you have a lot of learning you need to do. UNIX is a hugely flexible OS, but with that comes responsibility, so you need to know how to wield your sword well before you wield it.
Head to the Arch Wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/) and read the beginner's guide. Read this. Read that. If you don't know something or it looks interesting, read it. If you don't understand something, google it. Wikipedia is typically a good source of info; head there for your best bet at a definitive answer to/for something.
And about the terminal... it doesn't use a language. Things just print to it. And read stuff from it. That's it. Read about escape sequences to learn about how programs control (almost) all available aspects of the terminal.
AFTER you've read the wiki, played with (and even maybe broken/fixed) your system a little... take a look at the various languages out there, and pick the one you like the most. There are too many to count, really.
In the end you're going to have to use something like C because C is the UNIX language and you can't escape it, so getting used to the C syntax will benefit you in the end. Try reading about pointers (head to wikipedia for that one for sure but NOT wikibooks, the wikibooks article is really bad even though I tried to help it a bit) and if you can get your head around those, try skipping all the other languages out there and going straight to C.
Regardless of whether you use C at first, just know this: C is very low-level and is highly expressionistic. You have to input a lot of code to get what you want done with C, but not so much with other languages. C is, however, the second-fastest language out there, following assembly language. So, when you need speed, use C. However, for quick one-time executions or various system tools or utilities, you can usually get by with the shell or something like that.
In my opinion, here are a list of languages sorted in order of simplicity:
Shell scripting - built into your shell. Very simple to use but follows a rather interesting and highly loose structure.
PHP - many people will call you a wuss for using this, but I used it for months and it was great. Its support for graphical programs is very poor, so it's best kept to web- and shell-oriented scripting.
Ruby - this follows an almost English grammar, so is very readable and learnable. On the other hand, it's known to be amazingly, amazingly slow.
Perl - from how I've seen this used, I'd say that people would agree with me calling this UNIX's scripted, interpreted alternative to C. Perl is also written in Perl itself, which is quite a nice feature. You can write almost absolutely anything in this, but don't expect it to be too fast - Perl is quite a bit faster than Ruby, but not nearly as fast as C.
Python - Google use this for their help center thingy, and so do a lot of other projects. It requires you use indentation for formatting, however, so you can't make one-liners with this. It's HIGHLY structured, and from my perspective best for apps that need to be extended over time.
C++ - not much I can say for this one, except that it's like C, but OOP.
C - this is THE definitive, de facto UNIX language. If you ever write something remotely successful on a large scale that's small, fast and stable, it will almost likely be in C, and will most likely have taken a huge number of hours off of your hands before it was completed.
Assembly - this is more complex than C. I won't discourage you from having a look at the Wikipedia article on this, but don't worry if it takes you a long time to "get" it
Just my two cents.
-dav7
Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-16 19:15:28)