The huge number of different programming languages can make someone starting out feel worried. Should I be learning this language? Is a language better than another? Should I be spending time learning this language instead?
As someone who also went through the same language crisis, in my (a student's) personal opinion, after being comfortable with one language, learning other languages become very easy. Since most popular programming languages are similar in that they all support a combination of the Object-Oriented and Procedural Programming paradigms, if you are solid with one of them then the transition between any of them becomes very easy. Some examples of languages which fit this description include Java, C++, C#, Python, R, JavaScript, Ruby, Swift, Kotlin, Rust...
Another programming paradigm that is not as common but is still worth knowing about is Functional Programming. Some examples of this include Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, Scheme, Erlang... The reason for this, from my perspective, is that it offers the programmer a new perspective on how to approach programming. In addition, many popular programming languages, such as Python, C++11, Kotlin, Scala and Rust have support for functional-style programming. Having this as another tool in your arsenal is a very worthwhile pursuit (that, and functional programming is just really neat and fun).
With that said, here is a collection of some reference and resources for some of the popular languages. Hopefully this will be of use if there is ever a need to learn a new language.
Edited August 2020 by Quang Tran - Class of 2022. Contact me @bennington.edu if you have any questions or want to suggest an edit.
