Programming Language Advice to My Daughter, Part 1: Ruby

Mastering the wonderful Ruby language will get many benefits

My daughter is about to start her first IT job (internship) next week. A few days ago, we had a conversation about hypes in the software industry, many so-called new technologies and programming languages. I said: “You shall master 2 major languages very well and 2 minor ones well. Two majors: Ruby and C++; Two minors: Shell Script and Java”.

Please note that I don’t classify major or minor based on popularity, but rather on the benefits I got from over 20+ experience in software development. Programmers are often fixated on a particular language, I am sure you have all heard some heated arguments among programmers on this topic. Oh well, this is my advice to my daughter, if you don’t like my suggestions, close the browser tab.

Below are the programming languages I’ve learned and used. The bolded ones are that I used professionally, i.e., I get paid by writing code/tests in them.

• BASIC
• Pascal
• C
• Perl
• Shell
• Java
• JavaScript
• C++
• C#