08-31-2009, 09:14 AM
(08-30-2009, 06:48 AM)Matthias link Wrote: C++ & VB & PHP are the best languages to learn IMO.
I would strongly recommend not to start learning with PHP and Visual Basic. Firstly, Visual Basic is a dying language. The last version of the language was released in 1998 and all support for the language has been stopped since last year. Alternative may be the successor, Visual Basic.net, but I would really advice you to learn C# instead. It's a .NET language as well, has exactly the same possibilities, however, features a sane syntax as well.
As for PHP, it's nice and has an easy learning curve. It's easy to see results straight ahead, you type a single line of text and it works. A large advantage of PHP is that it's well documented, everything can be found on the php.net website. A large downside of the language is that there's loads of crap out there. There simply are thousands and thousands of people who think they can program in PHP, but actually cannot. At all. That logically results in a huge amount of badly written scripts with performance and security problems. Still, if you're going to aim for web-based programming (websites and applications) I would indeed advice using PHP, even if it were only because I'm member of the development group for it.
C++ simply still is one of the strongest and limitless languages out there. It has a tougher learning curve, is more complicated and requires you to keep many things in mind. Purely to name an example, every bit of memory you allocate needs to be freed by you, otherwise there will be memory leaks. Different from languages like C# and PHP it has no garbage collector which does that for you. If you have the motivation and time, C(++) certainly is the way to go.
In the end you don't learn a programming language, you learn to program. It's the logic which defines the possibilities and limits, not nessesarily the language. Things like code architecture, frequent security-related issues and common sense are equal in almost every language. Languages which represent a lot of the implementation-techniques are C++, Java, C# and the newest versions of PHP, lots of schools use Java or C#, the latter of which still gets my preference.