Ruby's the best language (shortest development time), but its very slow in terms of runtime speed. It's a great language to learn though if you're a total beginner. C++ is a difficult language, but offers the fastest speed / performance. It has a steep learning curve. Not the best language for beginners, but if you're thinking of high performance programming later on, it might be a good idea to learn it. The middleground is C# (both in terms of development time and performance) My recommendation: learn programming basics with Ruby. Then learn C# / Microsoft .NET and do all your programming with C#.
What a strange thread in this Forum, anyway... 90% of the posters apparently misunderstood your question. You are trying to be a better programmer in EL, there is no need to learn C or C++ for that, Haskel and so forth. You just need some basic programming skills and for that purpose you'll get a nice understanding using VB or VBA. Buy some beginner books and explore the capabilities of basic languages. Ruby could be interesting, but is too easy where many things are implied and this can be confusing when jumping back to EL. Forget about the "smart" people trying to convince you about OOP etc. Small steps KISS
Uh, heed your own advice... The OP mentioned "future use" as well as writing DLLs for TradeStation, not just EL. Good luck building a TS DLL using VB/VBA.
If my goal is to be able to write fairly complex scripts for WL with ease, what would be a cheap and efficient way for me to pursue my goal? My background: 1) an intro Fortran course 15 years ago (don't remember anything but all of it will come back if i just re-read the book, it was a pretty basic course) 2) taught myself to write simple scripts with VBA excel. i still takes me a while to write fairly simple VBA scripts. i often search the web for some simple piece of code that i can borrow. basically, i don't think i am a "natural-born" programmer. 3) at this point i am able to modify existing WL codes (C#) and write simple scripts myself by using the references in WL and help from WL forum.
OP states some confusion with more complex EL code. Yeah right, throw him into C, that'll fix it. Don't listen to this, janusen is correct. KISS is right. Focus on EL code, whatever you need to do to understand it. Line by line. Roll some of your own EL code. Do this before you try the programming language. You will have a long way to go before even considering writing DLLs. After comfortable with EL, try C# or VB. Ignore the geeks who are attracted to the honeypot 'Best Programming Language'. You just need the right language/IDE at the right time for your skill set.
I hear a lot of companies are switching (from languages like c#) to Ruby to save on development time. Might not be such a loss to learn some of these more simple languages.
I've read about it but isn't it generally for Web-type stuff? C# is still king for Windows GUIApp. Java for Linux GUI app. C/C++ for high end infrastructure.
not only web stuff. ruby/python/perl are languages where you can prototype and test things very quickly. companies are not moving away from c#,java,c++ but they are using the right tool for the job. if your testing an idea against static data do it in something like python rather than c++ (code/build/run ...repeat) keep in mind no matter how easy a language supposedly is, almost everyone will find it too difficult and give up within a week.
True... I've given up on F#. I just don't get the whole paradigm. I think it's a matter of necessity of learning it. If you work with other people and have a bunch of people moving with it, it becomes a better motivator...