Best Computer Language for a Newcomer?

General / FAQ
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Greetings y’all.

I apologies for these novice questions, however, if you look at my activity you will see I am DMOR (doing my own research).

When I first entered the Secret community I noticed a post stating…“I had to teach this person Linux.”

If I had to refresh/learn a computer language - which one should it be? Rust, C++, Linux, …?
I don’t mean to bother the community with these questions, but searching through the node, validator, etc. information can be overwhelming.

Thank you for your time, attention, and swift response to this matter.
PS. I always wanted to learn Linux

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Rust is the language that is used for smart contract development. In terms of interacting with the Secret Network, using a linux distribution using SecretCli and the CLI is the way to go. You can watch the following tutorial to jump right into interacting with the Secret Network with no background programming experience:

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Well in my opinion purely:

You should pick up some skills in Linux using CLI, as Secret Network officially supports that.
This should not be too hard.

If you want to do Secret Contract Development then you need to pick up Rust, although if you had prior C++ skills you would do better at rust.

Also @reuven i am excited for assembly script support in the future.

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Also @reuven i am excited for assembly script support in the future.

Trust me, so am I :smiley: As much as i love working with Rust, it’s definitely not the easiest thing to work with for beginners.

On that note, @LawfullyFree if you have no prior programming experience at all, I really recommend you get your feet wet with some Python first, to get a sense of programming basics. There are plenty of resources out there for absolute beginners in python. (this is a nice introduction that i stumbled upon on youtube a couple weeks ago but there are literal metric tons of other resources as well). Rust can be a little overwhelming for beginners as it has a steeper learning curve, even though later on it does a lot to guide your learning journey.

If you do want to hop straight into Rust, I can recommend The Book, The Tour, and The Examples (slightly outdated but still useful for some things). Of course there are many other resources and guides out there for getting started with Rust, although much less than Python of course. I’ve seen some guides on youtube, but there are also payed courses, an O’reilly book, and some privately distributed books as well. There was even an educational podcast!

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@LawfullyFree
Rust me, Rust is hard :eyes:
I know as I am fumbling with the basics myself, it feels closer to C.
@reuven I am just waiting for Assembly before I build a big project on Secret Contract honestly. Even if its months down the line.

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Something that’s probably closer than that is a rewrite of some of the interfaces exposed to contract authors to make them easier to use (The current implementation requires authors to deal with lifetimes when it really doesn’t have to), a release of some library tools that abstract away some common patterns, and a catalogue of examples that should make it easier for people to get started.

I hope that these will make it easier and less intimidating for people to approach this.

At least we’re not doing this in C++…

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