Out of all the programming languages you have around, which would you say is the hardest to learn?

I'd say Assembly is the hardest to learn. I had course in it and it was the one I had the most trouble wrapping my head around. It was just so different from anything else I had done.

I would have to agree with TonyB, but masm32 syntax makes it easier..

But i would also have to say it´s the one that´s worth learning since it gives you a better idea on how to write faster applications in other highlevel programming languages.

I'd say Assembly is the hardest to learn. I had course in it and it was the one I had the most trouble wrapping my head around. It was just so different from anything else I had done.

I was told people that code in Assembly earn around £80K

Yeah the pay is great if you have the grades to back the knowledge.. could make 120€/hour easy on some projects.

Out of all the programming languages you have around, which would you say is the hardest to learn?

Snobol.

I didn't even try to learn APL or Lisp.

Most of the other languages I've use are pretty much the same as each other. That is, you can design a program largely independently of the language you will code it in.

These days, I think the difficulty is not with learning the languages, it's learning the libraries of classes and routines, SQL capabilities, Document Object Model, and so forth.

Assembly for me. Then followed by C/C++ (well, once you involve pointers and say, MFCs)

Yeah, I pretty much left all my assembly in the one class I had to take and never looked back. :)

I've also found that (while not a programming language per se), yacc/lex is kind of a pain in the ass syntactically.

I'd say its between Haskell and Prolog. Assembly is long-winded rather than being conceptually difficult.

Microcode but you only have to worry about that if your programming cisc cpu's. After that i'd say assembly. Not surprising as they are the two lowest level's of programming language.

I do not agree with the above saying that assembly is the hardest. Maybe it is with the Intel x86 assembly, but that's about it.

I started programming when I was 9, doing a bit of basic. Then at the age of 14, I started doing 68000 assembly, learning myself reading some printed lessons. Then I continued doing ONLY assembly language for 8 years.

Later, I did a bit of C programming.

Now, I'm doing PHP stuffs, and frankly, I regret my assembly days. Sure, in Assembly, you can do stuffs that crash. But what happens nowadays, is that you write some high level language programming, it doesn't crash per say, but then it's extremely easy to do security issues if you don't take enough care. It's not as easy as one may think, and you can continue to write really poor code while not even knowing you do.

Last, I'd say that EVERY programmer should do some assembly for a while, in order to understand what's going on behind the scene. Otherwise, you will NEVER understand what a computer is.

Thomas

C/C++ is hardest programing language for me.
learning a programming language is not at all a difficult task.
infact it is very easy.You have to love the language .you always
have to ask questions for self introspection and you must also disturb your lecturers till your doubts are clear.you must try to write
your own programs on anything.

Have to say Prolog, only because I'd never have to think that way before. Assembly is just long-winded and prone to mistakes, meaning it's more annoying than difficult.

Assembly then C++, Not Many People Program in Assembly.

I'd say Assembly is the hardest to learn. I had course in it and it was the one I had the most trouble wrapping my head around. It was just so different from anything else I had done.

I am with Tony B on this. The closer you get to the machine level the more difficult it gets. We humans need tools to talk to our machines since reading long rows of 0's and 1's and programming languages just a step up from them tend to bake our noodle.

I really enjoyed learning Assembly, it is interesting to know how computer works, how variable are stored and moved between registers.
I don't like lisp, can't understand the lambda function thing, I guess that was hard for me.
Love python

Exactly, for some reason Assembly was fun to learn. It is quirky and interesting. It is like looking through a microscope at code and playing with the pieces.

Assembly seems to be the hardest language to use but almost any programming language is hard for me to grasp even by messing around with it. I learned some PHP & MYSQL but I am still not good at it by far.

I can't tell you whether you can learn programming easily, or if you can get a job doing it, but don't overwhelm yourself. Just learn one programming language to start with, and you'll be a good way towards picking up any others you want to learn next.
Good luck..!

I often struggle with functional languages because I've written a lot more imperative/OOP code. I think really learning the ins and outs of a language like Clojure/Lisp/Scheme or Haskell would take some doing at a conceptual level.

Assembly I never found that difficult. It's difficult to write and read, but not difficult to learn. The individual instructions are largely very simple and easy to comprehend. As a language, it's dead simple.

The hard part is understanding the architecture you're writing for and how to accomplish what you need to do using those individual instructions (e.g. knowing that the video buffer is at some architecture-specific memory address, what different interrupts do on your arch/OS, etc.)

I have always found a "most tedious" language uptil now Assembler and COBAL.
Most of language would find difficult but if you get once familiar and hang over it then you will enjoy them.

I think i found even C language as worst to learn in my days when i joined some classes to learn it. After 3 times joining different classes i was out of my mind as then i was always try to get away from this language...

Fortunately today with my efforts and dedication, i am able to learn the hardest language without taking help from anyone...

Learning Occam 2 made my brain bleed ...

If you haven't tried brainf.u.c.k, you don't know whats hard programming!
Give it a try and you'll see: assemble is nothing compared to brainf.u.c.k

I think all machinery language such as assembly or even C is kind of hard. Just think about you have to take care of the memory operation and gabage cleaning... In my opnion assembly is simple but very difficult to pgrogram.:cool:

So can we say that the fewer functions a programming language has, the harder it becomes to achieve something using that language ?

About 6 years ago, I did a couple of contracts as a PICK/Basic developer (£400 a day). Often used in massive corporations, insurance/banking, to run their main backoffice system with database backend, like a mini mainframe, DB2/Tandem type of stuff.... The language itself was fairly easy to learn, very similar to most of the other 2nd generation basic/procedural languages, but the hard bit was developing against generations of badly written code, none of it documented, not even original developers were still employeed, so for me, that was one of the hardest Languages to learn..

I learnt language called PReS to do contracts in the printing industry, developing code to produce dynamic printed content, from utility bills to junk mail. Part of the language built the document and the other part controlled the massive highspeed laser printers.

Many speciality languages can earn you lots of money if your willing to go where the work is.

So can we say that the fewer functions a programming language has, the harder it becomes to achieve something using that language ?

Negative. Perl has far fewer functions than PHP, but is far easier to use for certain tasks. PHP is easier for others.

iPhone programming... least so far. I can do C, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, VB, etc... and the stupid iphone is the one making me want to bang my head against the wall :)

Assembly language or lower level languages, because they are less based on ideas than moving bits around to do various tasks. People operate with ideas, and concepts, not computations and calculations. Perl and Ruby are "easy" to learn.

So can we say that the fewer functions a programming language has, the harder it becomes to achieve something using that language ?

That sounds about right. To (mis)quote someone else: "beware the Turing tar pit, where everything is possible but nothing is practical".

But at the same time doesn't it make it easier to learn the language? If you are only given eight operators than you can presumably learn the entire language very easily. Learning to actually do something with the language is another matter entirely but that isn't necessarily what was being asked here.

I think that generally the hardest language to learn will be one furthest away from what you already know. If you know imperative programming then Haskell will be hard because you have so much to unlearn. Someone who started out with Haskell would probably find Assembly very alien indeed.

However, even at the same sort of level one language can trump another. In my experience Perl is harder to learn than Python. They can both be used in the same sorts of ways, but Perl has arcane syntax (lots of special characters, often with duplicate meanings) and Python does a pretty good job of keeping syntax as clean as practically possible.

If you really want a challenge try picking up brain*, machine code (assembly is for the faint hearted), and Haskell. At the same time.