A programming- related senior project
 

My school, the School Without Walls in Rochester, NY, USA has an extensive senior-project requirement.

I started my senior year this September, and I decided to go with an idea that I'd been mulling over during the cours eof the summer: learning computer programming languages.

You see, despitre my extensive interest in computers, I've never gone much beyond simple Web work (HTML, rudimentary CSS and Javascript). So I wanted to expand what I could do with the last two, and learn 'real' programming languages not necessarily atatched to the Internet. C++ was the first thing that came to mind.

However, one of my community advisors pointed out that in his opinion, C++ was rather hard for beginners to start off on, so he suggested Python. (http://www.python.org) So I'll be working with that, maybe starting with C++ as a side project later in the year once I have a firm grasp of Python.

So, have any of you here really worked with that language before?

Re: A programming- related senior project
 

your advisor is right, c++ is no beginners language , however im not sure about his recommendation for python.
Imo you would be best off doing a bit of c# or java as both can be tied in with your web work if necessary. java through jsp, servlets and applets and c# though asp.net. They are also extensive enough to be used in a significant sense offline, c# especially so.
Im afraid ive got no experiance with python so i cant advise you there though

Re: A programming- related senior project
 

I don't necessarily want to connect the language I learn to web work, I think that advisor said something about using Python on the Web; I'll have to ask him for clarification on that.

Re: A programming- related senior project
 

mod_python for apache exists, and there are a number of frameworks out there for python. 'Django' is probably the most widely used.
I'm no expert, but python is quite friendly as languages go but (and this is by no means an all-bad thing) it is a lot less like c++ than either C# or java.
Ruby is 'similar' to python in many ways, and might be worth looking at (the 'Rails' framework for web apps has gained Ruby a lot of attention, but it can be used for 'traditional' applications).

Re: A programming- related senior project
 

Python is ideal to start learning. But bare in mind it's quite an high-level language, meaning that it hides all the nitty gritty. Java is ok, it's not as high level as Python though, and somewhat more complex.

Have a look at the online documentation and decide which you'd prefer to spend your time learning:

http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html -- heavy python duty tutorial
http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide -- a lighter introduction
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/ -- the java tutorial

C# is very popular these days, and if you're only ever going to use Microsoft Windows it's fine, but I can't say I've ever really looked at it.

If you've got some perverse desire to go really low-level, have a look at C. There are plenty of tutorials out there. But as it's low level it'll be a while until you start to create anything like the things you'll start of creating with Python or Java. And there's C++ if you want to learn a low-level language but in a different paradigm (called Object Orientated--things are organised in certain units which have their own special characteristics.)