I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.
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They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
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The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
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This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
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Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.
What is your purpose?
Do you just want a job or do you want to program for fun? If you want backend, that’ll be very different than frontend, do you want corporate or startup?
I didn’t care about that, but I think java, for backend would be a first choice, as it has the biggest amount of “it just works with that”.
I think scala is cool too, very modern and with A LOT of less boilerplate, all the JVM support, so it can work with almost anything in the backend, but for working for jobs, it’s not very used.
I had a job as a software engineer at corporate job but got let go. Mostly I enjoy backend. I can do front end programming but am very bad at making pretty things. Like sketch something out for what you want for a interface I can program it, but ask me “just make an gui for users” and it will be like win-me quality of bad.
JavaScript might be more widely appliable. Java is good to learn, too. If you learn Java, you can also learn Kotlin which is a glorious language to work with.