I took this from a post of mine on a different forum. So far it's brought up some great posts from people.
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For someone who's pretty new to computer programming, what would you recommend they learn? Not that you shouldn't learn the other, but someone who knows Python might not need C++ or visa-versa.

I asked a few reliable sources already.
My friend,(edit:fixed) who graduated from UT with Honors with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science, and is working on Andorid apps and participated in the recent Netflix competition, wrote this :
Out of the two...
Quote: Python is easiest to learn.

Which, I can say, is true. Five minutes in and I was already writing small 3 line scripts that worked.

Quote: Lots of experienced programmers prefer to use Python over C++ for certain projects.

I'm not sure about this. My friend above only worked with those who knew it; he doesen't know the language himself. Lo, from ODF-online.org, does know Python and worte:

Quote: I personally, do not like python. The advantages seem to be that you can do many things much faster than with e.g. C++, you can debug it easier etc... However, pythons runtime is a mess. Also, I think C++ has far more librarys (3D engines, physics engines, netcode libraries, whatever other libraries) to use than python. You might find a workaround to access them via a C++ workaround, but why not using C++ for the whole project than?
My conclusion is, that if you just want to have a bit of fun - use Python. But for everything more, I suggest only C or C++. (My 2 Cents

However, my UT friend did show some jelousy of Python users.

Quote: You can do serious work with Python, it's not just for fun. Often times, it's better to use Python because it'll take you 20 minutes to do something that will take you 2 hours with C++.


So far, I've been reading the Python documents tutorial introduction section to better understand Python and its uses. It opens with...

Quote:
If you do much work on computers, eventually you find that there’s some task you’d like to automate.
...
Or maybe you’ve written a program that could use an extension language, and you don’t want to design and implement a whole new language for your application.
...
You could write a Unix shell script or Windows batch files for some of these tasks, but shell scripts are best at moving around files and changing text data, not well-suited for GUI applications or games. You could write a C/C++/Java program, but it can take a lot of development time to get even a first-draft program. Python is simpler to use, available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix operating systems, and will help you get the job done more quickly.
/quote


Thank you.

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I've started with Python and will go into JAVA(GWT to javascript).

What do you guys think? Let's get some conversation going!

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