4 replies to this topic

[GeorgeW]

I have a young, incredibly bright student, who wants to eventually become a professional programmer. He's coding some incredible games using VB.Net, with silverlight, and now he's ready to spread out into something else. What language do you think I should advise him to start on? I originally thought C++, but maybe he should have a grounding in ASP.Net via the visual web developer, with C#?

[Vaielab]

Ask him what he want to do later...
Depends on his answer you will know what he want to learn, or at least it will narrow the possibility.

And of course if you show him some sql you can't never get wrong.

[tormaroe]

As he's already doing Silverlight with VB.NET, C# doesn't really give him any more power or opportunities - it's mostly the same, with different syntax (a much nicer syntax for sure, but still..). I would pick something that enables him to expand his knowledge more..

One idea would be to guide him towards a more dynamic programming language like Ruby or Python (IronRuby or IronPython on the .NET framework), but as he's used to Visual Studio and a nice, graphical environment (Silverlight), it might feel like a step backwards to begin with.

Or he might have a look at functional programming. F# would be a natural choice for an expiring .NET programmer, and the Visual Studio integration is good.

Web development might be more satisfying though. Maybe he should focus on JavaScript, which is becoming more and more important every day, now also server-side via Node.js. It's actually a really nice language when used correctly.

The most mind-expanding language though has always been Lisp. The most modern implementation is Clojure.

Lot's of possibilities :D

[RhetoricalRuvim]

Haskell is a purely-functional language.

As for web development, HTML then CSS then JavaScript then PHP is a nice sequence (that's the order I learned them in, from what I can remember).


But yeah, maybe you could give him some language options, with the descriptions for each language, and give him time to think about which language he wants to do next. Giving a sample of each language's syntax is also a nice thing to do.

[GeorgeW]

Thanks guys, I think I' going to show him HTML and CSS (using Aptana), and then start IronPython Or IronRuby for the net framework. I don't know if I'm the right person to be trying to guide him though, I started about 20 years ago, using VB2 (via turbo basic and turbo pascal), and my latest projects are in Visual web Developer, with C# as the code behind. I've been told that I write C# in a VB accent, and I really don't want to confuse him.