Emile comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: AdeleneDawner 01 March 2010 09:25AM

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Comment author: Emile 02 March 2010 04:37:14PM *  2 points [-]

I'd weakly recommend Python, it's free, easy enough, powerful enough to do simple but useful things (rename and reorganize files, extract data from text files, generate simple html pages ...),is well-designed and has features you'll encounter in other languages (classes, functional programming ...), and has a nifty interactive command line in which to experiment quickly. Also, some pretty good websites run on it.

But a lot of those advantages apply to languages like Ruby.

If you want to go into more exotic languages, I'd suggest Scheme over Haskell, it seems more beginner-friendly to me.

It mostly depends on what occasions you'll have of using it : if you have a website, Javascript might be better; If you like making game mods, go for lua. It also depends of who you know that can answer questions. If you have a good friend who's a good teacher and a Java expert, go for Java.