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Re: "Help me find my second language"
I'll comment about a couple of the languages you mentioned in passing.
Rust has the benefits of being ready for productiojn right now, having a significant community behind it, being the up and coming language for writing Python extensions in, and being generally on par with the fastest languages available. I personally love it due to the ease with which you can write parallel executing code while being reasonably sure that it's not going to blow up in your face.
It has the downsides of a fairly obnoxious community and it's famous learning curve. I don't think the latter is as big a problem as people make it out to be, but I'm definitely a bit disillusioned with the former.
Zig is also incredibly fast. I feel like Zig's feature set gets you about 90% of the benefits that Rust gives you with a much smaller learning curve. However, Zig is definitely pre-1.0 software. If you write something of any size in the language, you will absolutely incur extra maintenance overhead just due to how often breaking changes in the language. My opinion on Zig is that you should use it only if you believe that it will be able to deliver on it's promises in the future and are willing to bet on that, particularly if your hope is for learning a bankable skill. It could eventually overtake Rust in popularity, or it could fizzle out and die.
Here's my somewhat controversial opinion now. There is absolutely nothing wrong with learning C and/or C++ at this point, and both languages are likely to be in demand for decades to come even with all of their very real problems. In particular, I think it's good to learn plain C as no other language besides assembly will teach you more about how computers and algorithms work on a low level. Spend some time in C and you will have no choice but to eventually implement data structures that every other language take for granted just because there won't be a ready made solution, or because you will be able to tailor it specifically for your needs. Then, when you inevitably do pick up a task in a higher level language, you'll be making more informed choices about how you use and store your data.
1 hour ago
Help me find my second language — Background I am a data analyst/scientist doing spatial and temporal ecology stuff. I only use R because...that is what I..know ? I was never a programmer before I switched from env. engineering and recently was thinking to diversify a bit to Julia. I have quote a lot of freedom in my current job to program in whatever I want. Occasionally I have to do it in python for the GIS people downstream. The people downstream complain a lot about Python being slow in...