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What’s The Right Computer Language to Learn?
A soliloquy on preventing baldness from ripping out your hair
Hello everyone, I’m Tom and I’m an Engineer. I’ve been in Engineering for over 20 years and have been writing some computer code for the last 20+ years. I’m suffering from “finding the perfect computer language syndrome.” Please help me.
I’m not joking. I tear out my hair trying to find the right language to code in for my particular use case. There are 100s out there and each one fits a specific need but not one does everything I want to do.
I want speed, efficiency, and simple code. I want to learn it fast and be productive, and I want it to be visually presented for outputs. I want modern dashboarding and mobile responsiveness for building cool web apps.
In college, I learned the basics of Fortran. With its powerful computational ability and succinct code, it made sense. We Engineers needed to compute complex equations and just needed basic output. It wasn’t cool looking, just super nerdy. I promptly forgot it when I left school.
Once I got my first real job I spent my time writing spreadsheets that calculated coordinate geometry points, quantity take-offs, and simple regression outputs. I even opened up the Visual Basic Macro toolkit and tinkered with some…