Java or C++?

[rustom]

On Apr 14, 11:44 am, s0s... at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello, I was hoping to get some opinions on a subject. I've been
> programming Python for almost two years now. Recently I learned Perl,
> but frankly I'm not very comfortable with it. Now I want to move on
> two either Java or C++, but I'm not sure which. Which one do you think
> is a softer transition for a Python programmer? Which one do you think
> will educate me the best?

The movement from knowing no programming language to knowing one is
invariably a much larger one than the shift from one to two (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns).  That is you are
likely to get much less from this shift than what you got from python
two years ago.

So before you make this shift do ask yourself: have you got the best
of what python has to offer? I taught python in the univ for a number
of years and I would always tell my students that the library
reference gave a better conspectus of modern day computer science/IT
than anything else I knew of. [That not too many of them listened is
another matter :-) ]
Then python has a lot of advanced (new) stuff: generators and
generator expressions, comprehensions, lambdas and functional
programming, descriptors and protocols....

That said you can of course choose your second language to optimize
your learning (where optimize could be minimize or maximize!)

One language that is promising (and under active development) is curl.
(http://www.curl.com)
It is targeted to be
like C++ in efficiency (native compiler not VM or interpreter)
like C#/Java in its OOP with gc style
like Javascript in supporting dynamic rich web apps
in addition to replacing HTML