Looking to learn a new programming language

[Andrew Lyle Global Moderator]

I want to learn something that is fairly easy to pick up, but do what I want it to do.

Right now I am taking a course of VB in college, but it is only covering the very basics, such as change font colour, add fields together etc etc.

I am looking for a language to help my business grow by creating a program to interact with my web site, and get data from the MySql database. I am sure all languages can do this one way or another, but what is the easy way to do this, using the easiest language possible

Edited December 1, 2008 by lylesback2

[Malisk]

n the end, Python just felt better, and it seemed faster too when I ran a Fibonacci generator that did its work recursively. Of course, the speed in PHP is poor compared to those two.

Your hunch was right; Python is usually faster than Ruby.

You can compare programming language performances here, using various benchmark programs: The Computer Language Benchmarks Game

Here's Python vs Ruby, for example: Comparison. Python consistently outpaces Ruby on these benchmarks, except for memory usage. (white bars is execution speed, black for memory usage)

Python vs PHP here: Comparison

... and for a "reality check", here's Python vs C# (the OSS Mono implementation of it): Comparison

... and C# vs C++: ;) Comparison

As for VB, I don't have any personal experience with it, so I can't say whether it is good or bad. I will note that if you already know it, and you can work with ASP.NET, then it'll save a lot of time since you won't be learning a completely new language. I do know that C and C++ programmers complain about VB developers a lot though... I've heard things like "VB programmers are just script kiddies that know how to use an IDE and compile programs". To get an idea of what I mean, check out this page and this page. VB programmers have a horrible reputation...

VB 6 was a pretty icky language if you ask me, but VB.NET is on the level of C# and a full-fledged object-oriented programming language, with the same kind of execution speed and memory usage as C# too, because they both compile to IL code running on the same .NET runtime. The difference between the two is really mostly in the syntax.