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General Discussion

What is the hardestest language to learn?

Any

Moderator edited: moved to "General Discussion" as the question does not pertain to any specific course material in the "Business" category.

3 Answers

Jennifer Nordell
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STAFF
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

Hi, Dimitrio! If you're referring to a written/spoken language it's going to depend heavily on which language you have as your native language. However, I was able to find this list of the difficulty of language learning where English is your native language.

If you're referring to programming languages, that's harder for me to answer. Many programming languages you come across will contain similarities. The "big ideas" tend to remain the same, while the details/syntax about how we write them are different. Many times, it comes down to the personal preferences of the programmer.

Hope this helps! :sparkles:

Simon Coates
Simon Coates
28,694 Points

I have to agree about it coming down to the "personal preferences of the programmer", or their type of mind and the paradigms with which they're familiar. If you know OO, you're going to have a head start on jumping to any language that is conceptually similar. If you like loose languages, you might be frustrated by something stricter (or vice versa). Some people like coding details (and a sense of control) whereas other people like code languages/platforms where you get a lot for free (eg. magic type conversions). I'd assume some AI languages are hard to learn, but the most difficulty i've seen was watching an entire university class have a collective psychotic break when asked to write programs for a 6800 emulator. They just weren't used to thinking in a low level mode.

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
230,995 Points

Assuming you mean programming language...

There's an entire category of languages known for their difficulty. These are sometimes called "esolangs", short for "esoteric programming languages". There's a nice wikipedia page that gives many examples.

In addition to those listed there, I'd also add COW, where all keywords are a variant of "moo", and TECO which was actually a text editor decades ago but had an extremely powerful but terse built-in macro language.

I remember once being very fluent in TECO myself, to the point where I wrote entire applications in it (including other text editors!). Today the only thing I can recall offhand is "yhxxmx", which was the command sequence given to start an application running and is apparently permanently burned into my brain's non-volatile memory. It's probably the only language on this list that was not at all intentionally esoteric by design.

And finally, something related you might find amusing:
languages

Cool!!

I will create an app that converts spoken words in any language into beautiful complex and simple clean lines of computer code!!