Unit 13: A Future in Coding?

I would like to learn a computer language. I mentioned on D2L that I took a MOOC from Udacity on the Python language (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101). I found it interesting and definitely experienced that wonderful high of solving a problem via coding, but a lot of the examples weren’t very interesting to me.

I have heard of people using Code Academy (http://www.codecademy.com/) to learn about coding. I am planning on looking into it over the winter break. I’d like to learn Javascript (and Java) because it seems really useful for creating web applications, which is something I’m interested in doing.

I read somewhere that Ruby (specifically Ruby on Rails) was really in-demand and could lead to a salary increase, but I can’t find the article. I think it was something posted on ALA Think Tank’s Facebook page.  I don’t know much about that language or its applications.

My brother was a computer science major and works at a biotech company programming robots and writing tools for data analysis. He uses Fortran, Perl, Ruby, and C (or maybe C++) in his job. I can’t imagine what its like to know so many different languages. Do you get them mixed up? Is it obvious which language is better suited to solving a certain problem? I would like to have some of the same facility with using programming to solve a problem as my brother has, but I’m not looking to learn so many languages!

I’m not really interested in learning coding in order to get a better job at this point. It’s more that I want to learn how to make things that I would like to use. I am taking a course in the Digital Humanities this semester and have become inspired by the researchers who are designing tools to help them with their research. I would love to work in a digital humanities lab and help out these scholars in the future.