Currently going for informatics major at my college and taking a c101 class. My question is, is learning c++ that useful or should I stick with C sharp or another language?

i don't know exactly what is involved with an informatics major but c++ is becoming more niche thanks to languages like Python.

Would you consider Python to be the "go to" language then rather than c++ or any other language?

Probably. Of course it depends on the task, but python is now often used in both data analytics and backend web design.

Good reads:

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

https://blog.newrelic.com/2016/08/18/popular-programming-languages-2016-go/

C++ (and also C, of course) also gives you a very good feeling. It doesn't feel as "pussy" as coding in Java or C#.

Any serious developer must learn at least some C and C++ at some point, it teaches you a lot about memory allocation, pointers and a lot of other fundamental stuff if you wanna go a bit more technical. Plus it's really nice to hold a bazooka once in a while, those languages give you A LOT of control over your system resources.

We have to actually consider that Java and C# took a lot from C++, it may even be called their "father.

To sum it up, it really depends on your goals though. What are you willing to achieve? How "deep" are you willing to go?
Are you just after basic algorithms learning and/or programming logic or are you willing to go further?
What is your major about? What do you mean by 'useful'?

Python is popular, but by no means the go-to for your server-side language. Additionally, web design typically refers to front-end and that isn't python.



This. We need to know WHY you're learning to code and what you want to do with it.

The only problem with python in terms of data analytics is when you are dealing with big enough data, that you want to parallelize it somehow. As long as you are writing pure python including usage of some modules like pandas or even dask, you are fucked atm. It is really nice to have those C/C++ skills developed up to some point.. especially given the fact that you don't have to program those scenarios on low-level anymore thanks to libraries like TBB.

Spark is one of the leading big data frameworks and it can be used with Python.

/e it may even be strictly Python, not sure.

This post was edited by Mastersam93 on Mar 8 2017 10:22am

C++ is becoming more redundant gradually and it's one of the harder languages to learn. I started out in c++ and can say personally choose an easier language like c# or python to start out. Things just make more sense.