What language to learn

What programming language should I start with? My ultimate goal is to be a mathematical physicist and make some money during uni by writing adware for facebook and shit.

Writing here because the contingent is smarter and sci-related.

It really depends, but the most rigorous and applicable programs generally for CS understanding are C++ first for understanding and JAVA for monies. Even simpler to start with RUBY and PYTHON are good places to begin and also marketable.

Also be prepared to learn Mathematica, MATLAB, and potentially FORTRAN. But these are not starter programming languages, rather the standards in physics.

C++.

You'll likely need to know python and fortran, eventually.

I think C is cool.Linus Torvalds has written Linux in C.

Pytton Fortran, and why nobody names LISP? I thought LISP is for mathematicans, isnt it?

Python, C++, and Mathematica

...

C and Racket

Excel

i think facebook is written in php

theoretical physics postdoc here

by my third year at university i'd learned (and used in physics applications) c++, python, matlab, mathematica, java

in my phd i learned fortran from my supervisor, and i'm looking at learning R

i'd start with python and c++,

> no one writes LISP
Not entirely true, but for the most part it's not a relevant language. AI research is not really done in it anymore, for example, as most people now work in Python/C (c.f. TensorFlow, Theano etc). Some attempt to bring it back can be found in Clojure which targets the JVM but this is still a niche.

This guy gets it. To start, just learn Python. Then learn Javascript if you are still serious about writing crap that targets people's browsing habits. These 2 get you through most companies. Or learn Java.

> R
Only if you are eyeing a seriously statistical question. Most common stats methods are actually implemented in e.g. scikit-learn for Python (with some exceptions, such as good bootstrap libraries).

Where's the best free place to learn Python?

I started Zed Shaw's book Learning the Hard way. /g/ has a very low opinion of him but won't mention why.

How does it feel to know you won't have a job?

All the theoretical physics postdocs I know have jobs. It's not hard if you do research and publish as an undergrad. As long as you go to a good grad school, you'll get a job.

Visual basic is a great all-rounder

It is quite basic to look at and to learn, yet has slightly more speed that assembly

I'm in computational biophysics, so not exactly what you wanna be.

We use python/Perl, FORTRAN, and R for people who do hard statistics. Other than that, python modules like pandas or numpy/scipy are more than capable

Just write everything in C, learn power8 asm, and x86 asm. Simple embedded instruction sets you can learn in a day or two if you ever work with them.

C is a lingua franca because you can show anyone scientific C code and they will understand it, eventually.

Anything web java is good to know. Anything scientific matlab or mathematica or python. For low level computationally intensive things a compiling language like c or c++.

>My ultimate goal is to be a mathematical physicist
MATLAB

>make some money during uni by writing adware for facebook and shit
PHP

All other answers (except maybe python) are pic related CS-shitter tier

>Physicist
MATLAB. Python + NumPy is popular too. C or C++ is also good for applications which are computationally expensive. C++ or Python are very generalist languages, but Python is probably easier if you have no prior programming experience.