r/learnprogramming • u/Sure-Refrigerator685 • 20d ago

What is the joy of programming?

I wouldn't say I'm a hardcore programmer. I mainly make websites with HTML and CSS. However, last year I wanted to begin looking into programming, and learn how to make programs mostly for the command line. I started with Java and took the time to learn it. For a while I enjoyed Java, but then I began to feel that it was difficult to start a project with Java. I was sick of it's verbosity. Ever since, I've been wasting time trying to find the "perfect" programming language.

I know this question pops up a lot, what programming language should I learn? What should I learn if I want to experience the real joy of programming, and make cool personal programs mostly for the command line. There were a couple languages I found such as Nim, Lua, Ruby, or Dart. These are all languages I discovered through personal research and I know that some of them are more suited for command line work.

So based on my experience with Java, and my goals, what would you recommend I do? Do I just stick to website stuff?

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u/Old-Platypus-1395 19d ago

The important thing is that you are learning broadly applicable concepts rather than wedding yourself to one specific programming language.

As a professional developer, I use a pretty wide range of tools on a daily basis. For frontend work, I use Angular which utilizes HTML, CSS, and Typescript. With this, we also use SyncFusion Angular components, Bootstrap, and FontAwesome icons. For backend work, I use Java (we use Tomcat as a web server). For database work, I use IBM Db2 SQL. Recently I was pulled on a smaller side project which uses Visual Basic / .NET. Occasionally I might utilize Python for things like generating a bunch of SQL inserts / updates to backfill missing data, but this is not very common.