Ask HN: Confused semi-newbie programmer needs some advice.

Good refresher: http://www.diveintopython.org/

Now, in C, working with lists requires knowing a bit about how pointers work. If you worked in a different language and used the language's libraries, you might literally never think about how the list is internally represented ever again, and concentrate solely on the API for it.

The biggest suggestion I have for supplementing (not replacing) your expensive CS education is building stuff concurrently with learning stuff, and I don't mean the little toy 100 line projects they assign you for school. Unfortunately, with where you are in the world right now, building stuff is hard. However, if you teach yourself HTML and get ONE dynamic language half-way under your belt, you'll be able to do web programming, which greatly simplifies displaying output to the user. Then all you have to do is do string processing, and blam, you have something FUN to show to the user.

You'd be amazed how far you can get on just combining those simple building blocks. As you grow in expertise, you can go a LOT farther, but for now, learning how to take input from the user, do some crunching, and show them a web page gives you many, many options for doing fun things.

You will probably get involved with many languages in the future.

Every language has its purpose.

Here's a bit of my personal experience. almost two years ago I took my first formal programming courses. It started out with Algorithms (DFD, etc.) and Operating Systems. Then we moved on to C++. At first, I felt just like you: aside from the basic programming principles and logic I learned in Algorithms, all I knew was how to do stuff in C++. I took up Ruby (mainly due to Rails, but it helped me discover a wonderful language).

The curriculum progressed: Java, Delphi, SQL, Visual Basic, .NET, PHP, HTML&CSS, (which I already knew), etc.

You'd be surprised at how much these concepts come back and help out. Basically, what you learn in the first couple of classes is not "how to do stuff in language x", rather how to think and develop an effective algorithm, which can be applied to any programming language. Right now, you know how to do stuff in C++. When you learn another language, you'll just have to learn the syntax and some other quirks, and you'll pick it up quickly.

For example, in my class we took up a good level of Pascal and Delphi in 2-3 months of class, which is not too shabby.

This is a great place to start: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

If you want an absolute mind blowing trip, grab a copy of scheme or a lisp variant such as Clojure [hip at the moment].. and work through SICP - 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' the classic course by abelson and sussman of MIT.

You can download the lecture videos and the full course is online. Seeing how they introduced lisp programs to calculate derivatives and do symbolic algebra was awe inspiring.

Language does matter : Python Ruby Haskell.. all respectable, but Id go to the source for some subtleties you'd enjoy - lisp is probably the foundation of all computer languages in some mathematical sense.

If you have 10 months before you got back to university, I suggest, you work with one language and build something substantial in that time. It doesn't matter which language you select (and this is where my advice differs from those of people who recommend lisp/Haskell and so on, you could choose C or C++ or Java, it doesn't matter).

The key is to make something substantial, but which also has a lot of intermediate stopping points (a ray tracer/renderer is a good example, it gives you visual feedback of your progress) and work on it every day. Writing a large program is substantially different experience from working through toy examples and you will learn a lot, irrespective of the language you use.

Of course you could still use lisp or haskell or smalltalk (EDIT: if you are already somewhat familiar with them, learning a new language and building something large is tricky) if you so choose, but it doesn't matter really.

Just build something ambitious.

My 2 cents. Good Luck.

So when we later got to C, the new things were the syntax and the imperative model, but most students had learned enough about algorithms to know what they wanted to do, which made it a lot easier to learn.

After that we also tried out Prolog, which belongs to yet another paradigm, so over the first year we tried a variety of languages that got you thinking very differently about programming than if you'd only do an imperative language.

Later on in the program we had some courses that went down closer to hardware, we did assembly language, and we even wired our own processor, did the microcode for it, and wrote a small assembly program for the "computer" we made.

Over the course of the entire program we never dug deep into one specific language or paradigm, but we went across the entire field of computer science, and that turned out to be an excellent foundation. In my experience, the people I know that are really good programmers have all done this, either through university, or by self-study. It requires a lot of passion for programming to do it by yourself though, but it's an alternative to finding a diverse CS program that focuses on breadth instead of depth.

I don't necessarily believe you should keep chugging away at C/C++ until the language kind of disappears and you're left staring at the concept, but if you jump from language to language hoping one will open up things for you, I think you're walking the wrong path. My suggestion is that unless you fully intend to truly learn another language, you should stick with C/C++ and just progress with it. Once you are really comfortable with it, move on to something else. Trust me, once you do have that first language under your belt, the others come a lot more easily.

If you really do want to switch to a different language, I would suggest Python. I learned Python the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, and I felt that the language gets out of your way a lot more than Java (the only language I really knew before then). I think Lisp or Haskell might be a bit too much of a stretch from your C/C++ background. I've heard programmers that have been programming for years stumble over Lisp. It's a different way of thinking, and if you're just trying to broaden your horizons, you should be able to do that without learning a different way to think.

I'd also fallow the advice of some of the other people on here and actually build something. I've had a lot of fun doing web development with Ruby on Rails. Ruby's a great language as well, but I found it a little harder to parse coming from a C++-like language than Python. I've heard great things about Django, so maybe you could try building a web app in it?

Before entering the course i was skeptical , and until the thirty year i fell like i was wasting time. The point is, when you are at the academic world, it´s not about how get real things done, it´s more about to learn general concepts to build a solid base (in terms of knowledge). With this base, you will be able to learn how to get REAL thinks done much more fast, in a very professional way(read, trustable for the "market").

Therefore, you are not going to CS (or Math, another good option) to get things done, you are going to build a very good "BASE" to get (a lot of) things done.

In a simple way, goes like this: Learning lisp, python, c++ and java, you are investing on "content" for your professional life. Going to CS you are investing in "context". A guy who learns lisp in a garage is very different from a guy who made CS and learn lisp by himself. The second one have much more "base" and a better context to solve problems, although both have the same "content" (the lisp knowledge).

Don´t give up on CS and try to be close from as much people as you can, specially the good guys ... in this way you will be building a very good "context".

Oh, about the programming language ... i think you are starting from the wrong point. First, you should pick up an idea or project to implement (something that you really want to do) and then you go for the language. And yes, the best way to get "content" is working on real projects. Ruby is good for scripting, as python and php are, so if you are going to build something for the web, you should not think about C, C++ and Lisp, just pick a language more close to the web related stuff. But if your idea, or project is about mathematics, desktop and hard calculations, forget about ruby and php and go for C or Lisp. Therefore you start choosing a project (or idea) and then the programming language to learn, not the language and then the idea.

Well, i´m a very noob just like you, and my words are probably full of lies, but that´s my experience in the last five years. Hope you can get something useful from this big (sorry by that) post.

And sorry by my poor english.

  - C (imperative)
  - Python (object oriented)
  - Scheme (functional)

Today, web-enabling almost always is a requirement. People usually want access to their applications with their iphone and in the worst case (the battery just exploded, notebook lost, etc.) from a cybercafé.

Sure, you can web-enable most (business) applications with pure HTML/CSS. But if you take advantage of the power of AJAX (XMLHttpRequest), you can build GUIs with such high performance that it feels (almost) like a regular desktop application and therefore people often don’t even care about installing the available client-application on their office computers. People love it if they don’t have to install anything at all.

I would start with something like that: Imagine you’re abroad and your notebook just fell down the stairs - it’s broken. What would you like to have access to in that situation from a cybercafé. Maybe an address book? Now imagine, that the cybercafé you are into has an awfully slow connection and they charge you a fortune for every single byte that travels their connection. So, your address book should be fast as lightning, means: nothing similar should go over the wire more than once (search box, headers of your address list, pagination elements, etc.). There's nothing that can beat JavaScript in solving this problem.

High level programming languages are froth; once you understand the basic concepts, it's best to work with C and system calls til you're absolutely sure what you are doing. Learn how to use a debugger, disassembler, packet sniffer and every utility you can find for creating mischief.

A few books on actual hacking, you know, the "blackhat" kind, might come handy. Hacking tutorials from the underground scene are masterpieces of juvenile bravado but they're written by people with heart. No one in academia or industry has the same passion for computing, or for that matter skill, as those "vandals".

Get a screw driver and take your machines apart (yes, get more than one machine.) Network them. Break them. Boot obscure OSes on them. Get as many computers with different architectures and instruction sets as you can get.

You don't deserve to be coding in a fancy functional distributed language with rad tools. You need to pay your dues first and get your hands dirty.

Your university probably sucks; your professor, your TA and the A-student in your classes are probably all lousy programmers. Your library there is under-stocked. Any industry representative who comes to give a speech about computing is probably a fraud. And once you graduate, or drop out, and make computing a profession; if you ever have to assemble a team of top-notch programmers to work with, the first names to standout will be strangers who you know by their nicknames from underground computing subculture. The guys you see doing interviews and recording lectures in polo shirts and khakis are laughably incompetent, big enterprise or "startup".

Join the demo scene, the amiga scene, the root-kit scene, the virus scene, the calculator hackers, etc. to see what good programmers look like. Real, honest to goodness hacking without blogging, self-promotion or careerist pan-handling. They do it for the love it, them honest thieves.

You are not in a CS curriculum to learn C++,Java,Scheme,etc.

Good luck.

Oh, and the stuff Mahmud said about your professors and industry types being phonies is largely true. Not always, of course, but often enough. That you're even on this site suggests that you're prepared to think deeper than them.

How did they get created or conceptualized in the first place? Why do we need them?

Do it the right way: Start with C, and start from the smallest and most fundamental constructs that C has: The structures and functions. Know that there was only assembler in the first place. Then look into how function calls are made. Disassemble the simplest function you have and understand its logic. Now you know why there is a function. Then go into the structure. Disassemble one. Put different types in it, see how they get laid out in memory.

Start as above, and learn how things work down to the last byte. Then eventually you will cover all constructs created and you will know where they come from. Do the above for 3-5 years, each time you encounter a new language idiom or concept.

Finally you will see that in all strongly typed languages most constructs are worthless and they get in your way. You will get back to using C ;-)

You might also go for the much higher level languages or different areas of computing, but since you showed interest in understanding programming deeper, this is the way to go.

The perks: functional and object oriented compact syntax lift is an excellent web framework appears to guide design towards application or library perspectives Dave Pollack feels that his perception of programs and functions has changed to state modifications and data transformations. I don't quite see it but I'm a noob.

But it is still a good idea to learn a new language just to get a new perspective. I would recommend that you learn a highlevel functional programming one, like Lisp, Scheme or Haskel. This will really give you a different perspective from C/C++ and teach you to think about programming in a completely different way.

I strongly recommend you check out this Haskel tutorial (which I found on HN myself):

http://learnyouahaskell.com/