I know SD has a big and diverse forum, but this still has to be a pretty sucky place to ask that question.
Except, seeing as it's the "new shiny", you'll likely have a lot of people thinking the same thing and making a go at it. Plus, it's target platform is limited.
Fortran. Yeah...fortran. That's not an obsolete or stupid language to be required to study in order to graduate at all.
As far as the raw number of jobs you can do a quick search on Dice. About twice as many mention Python. But searching just job titles they are about even. Same for CareerBuilder. A more detailed analysis to determine average salary, time to fill position, trends, etc, would be required to determine which is more economically advantageous as a career path.
An if statement is an if statement. All the languages are basically the same if you know what's going on underneath the hood. No need to learn one over the other, just because it's more trendy. Btw, Rails is a framework not a language.
I'd say Python Hah Fortran may be ugly, but you'd be surprised. Last I head it was still very prevalent at NASA. I mostly agree with your point. It really is all the same shit, and if you learn the general concepts, you'll be able to bounce from one language to the other. That said, I'd tell someone to learn Java over, say, Ada haha
I'm just bitter about being forced to study it over a more modern language. Physicists have a ton of source code already writting for Fortran, and no one wants to take the time to rewrite it, so it gets used even though there are better/more efficient languages available. No idea about NASA, but a buddy I graduated with was actually told to take Fortran off of his resume because it looked so bad to have it on there over a more applicable language. I'm sure there is a more logical explanation for that, but that's how he explained it to me.
Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's why it's still prevalent at NASA - everything has already been written, and it'd take a long time and a shit ton of money to write it in something else. But the fact of the matter is that it's still used, it's still out there, and it's a skill worth having. Also, it's an OOP language. It may be archaic, but if you're learning the concepts, you won't have too much trouble jumping into Java or C++. As it was already stated in this thread, it's all the same shit. Here's an example: take the statement "go fuck your mother in her asshole". Well, before you learn that statement in 10 different languages, you first have to understand what it means to fuck, what a mother is, and what an asshole is. Once you learn what everything means, you can then learn it in different languages and it all comes easy. Hopefully that helps. and your buddy was given horrible advice. Like, I really can't stress that enough. That's fucking terrible advice.
Python is more established and versatile so I vote that. I used to manage a software change tracking site done in python. It was super easy; you basically just print out the html and there are simple data adapters to store query results in a data structure -- doing sql queries was just as easy as with c#/asp.net. I don't know much about Ruby on Rails but I doubt you can do all that with it as easily. As was mentioned it is a framework not a language However I would say C# is easily more useful than either of those.
Different languages have different libraries that are better suited to different tasks. Try writing a desktop app with javascript, or try using C to write some client side scripts for a web page.
