Ask Slashdot: What Language Should a Former Coder Dig Into?

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 6, 2012 @10:50AM from the getting-your-chops-back dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I was a consultant for nearly 20 years and I got into projects where I had to work with a huge variety of software, operating systems, hardware, programming languages, and other assorted technologies. After retiring from that I have spent the last 10 years in a completely different sector. Now I find myself wanting to really focus on coding for personal reasons. You can imagine how out-of-touch I am since I never really was more than a hack to begin with. I can learn syntax and basics in a weekend, question is, what Language should I become native to? Never liked anything 'lower-level' than C, and I don't have the funds to 'buy' my development environment....help me Slashdot, you're my only hope."

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Re:Python by sylvandb · 2012-05-06 12:46 · Score: 0, Flamebait

I think javascript is just about the worst possible choice in popular languages. (php would be worse)
Javascript is strict about things that do not matter (e.g. trailing comma in a list) and not at all strict about things that could make a real mess (e.g. trailing semi-colons, or not, at the end of each line).
Javascript is a huge hack and it shows.
Which javascript environment would you learn? firefox? chrome? internet explorer? Something else? Why would you want to incur the complexity of the world that is javascript when you aren't forced to?