What programming language are you learning?

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I recently got a mail from my friend saying:
(if (learning-programming? [shubham])
        (println (language-preferences [shubham]))
        (println (reason [shubham])))

Well the conversation got me into the new languages of the modern day developers.

Just like most human use English over the web to communicate, developers use these programming languages. While in older times when you got to see floppy disks in real life, the purpose of these languages was to communicate with the compters in general. But while you were debugging your intricate C loop, the world has pretty far changed to make languages more like reading your favorite novel. The goal is now to make the language more easier to read so that the code and be easily understood and modified.

In most Indian colleges, they teach you stuff like – C, C++ and Java for the most in terms of langauges and you spend you nights completing you final year projects in them.
All these while somewhere in the open world of Internet are lurking some new languages ready to look at your face and say to you – “You still code in it. Get a life!”
This because you don’t need to effort that hard. Believe me I have met Java developers who haven’t the word ‘design patterns’ and developers who write intense multitasking programs in Java. And I believe they seriously need to get a life.

But in reality these languages don’t really matter the most in your pack of skills. The objective of the making software products is to do it as simply as you can. So if you’re trying to hardcode a web application using HTML, CSS and JavaScipt, someone will just use Google App Engine and will get enough time to watch loads of lolcats before his lunch break.
While you spent semesters learning to code, a lecturer might have stood up and said that he’s gonna end programming in a single 50 minutes lecture and he did. So must for my three school years struggling with BASIC and then Java.

There are emerging new things everyday. There’s languages like Clojure which will make tasks like AI simpler and languages like Python and Ruby to make you type less and there’s Scala to make some parts of programming further simpler. Your C code of a hundered lines can be written in four lines of Python.

Well you need to learn one thing – You’re just as powerful as the weapon you chose.
I have been a C purist and struggling out in this world to code less has been real fun to me and so will it be for you.

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