Continue with C++ or move to Java?

[mwell008]

Hello all, I have a question (and I realize this might not be the best forum to ask it).

I have very limited (VERY limited) coding experience. I have taken one college course on C++ and I can create pretty much nothing actually useful. But, I have learned that I absolutely love coding and I actually have a bit of a knack for it (of course I haven't done anything super difficult, yet, but I had a much easier time in the class than some of my peers, and my code was always very clean compared to many of my classmates as well).

I am looking to learn more and continue going and I would love if it eventually became something I was proficient enough in to be useful even to the point of hire-able in coding.

I am very interested in learning Java (because of it's application, it seems like a great option if I eventually want to get a career related to coding with what I would want to code), but I wonder if I should continue to learn C++ until I am somewhat proficient before moving to Java, or if I should just go straight to Java since it's going to be potentially more relevant?

I'm hesitant to abandon C++ because I'm comfortable with it, but I also know that is a lame reason to stick with it because I can't just go about ignoring other languages just because they're different. So, I wanted some opinions (albeit a C++ forum is probably a less than neutral place to ask if I should learn C++ or Java) on what I should do.

Thanks for any input or advice that you might have for me!

[JLBorges]

> I am very interested in learning Java
> I wonder if I should continue to learn C++ until I am somewhat proficient before moving to Java

Move to Java; move to what interests you more right now.

You can always come back to C++ if you feel the need to do so after some time; once you are confident enough, you could also continue learning both languages in parallel.

[Thomas1965]

I have taken one college course on C++ and I can create pretty much nothing actually useful.

I guess you are not alone. C++ is a huge, very complicated and complex language. It will take quite a while before you can think about starting real apps or games.

I would recommend to move to Java or even C#. The people I know could write some simple GUI apps or games after just a few weeks. It seems there are much more and better learning resources available for these languages.

[mwell008]

Yeah, the most complex thing I created was a program that could make an upward pointing arrow the size the user requests. I know loops, conditional statements, functions, arrays, vectors, and I think that's about it.

So I guess I'll move to Java. I've looked at some of the code and it's similar and I feel like it will be fairly easy to get to a similar level of knowledge with Java. It sounds very promising.

Thanks for the push to just move to Java. You are right that I can always come back to C++ later.

[Thomas1965]

A good point to start in Java seems to be https://mooc.fi/en/
If you are interested in ganes have a look at the Greenfoot project: https://www.greenfoot.org/door