Is learning your second programming language harder than learning the first?

Question

Many years ago i started programming in Excel VBA, and it was relatively easy to learn this first language, however when trying to learn a second language it felt much harder than learning the first one: new syntax, paradigm, tools. Everything so different from what i had happily been using so far. Particularly difficult was to answer to myself this silly question: "what can be done on this second programming language that cannot be done on the first one?". Just wanted to know if other coders here at SoloLearn had a similar experience. Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm newbie... As my experience, If you learn a high level language first(such as python) then learning a low level language (c/c++) as second language will be harder to learn. But if you learn that low level language at first time then it will be more harder... I just answered what I know still now. My opinion may be wrong....(sorry for broken English)

Answer 2

VBA is more narrowly scoped. VB would have broader applications.

If you're mostly interested in tabular data, you can try SQL. I found it to be very straightforward after Excel and VBA.

Also, some languages are just set up well. Others, not so much. This seems to have little bearing on (correlation to) its popularity and endurance (e.g. the prototype for "vanilla" JavaScript was thrown together in ten days so it's kind of messy, despite the scope being fairly narrow to websites).

Once you start learning about the special terms that programming language geeks use to identify and distinguish/differentiate features of various programming languages, it will be easier to answer your not-so-silly question. 🙂

For example (incomplete list and in no particular order):
- Turing completeness
- OOP vs functional
- Statically vs dynamically typed
- Strongly vs weakly typed
- high vs low level
- interpreted vs compiled

etc.

Answer 3

Excel VBA is kind of a joke. It's easy to learn because it's easy not because it's your first.