My personal recommendation is Visual Basic, assuming you use Excel for anything beyond recording what you ate for breakfast. VB extends the functionality of it ten fold, if you know a few basic things. It has the added bonus of being a very easy language to learn, the syntax is pretty much English. That being said, no company is ever going to use VB as a real programming language, but it sounds like employment is not your goal.
Edit: Also, it’s important to note that (at least I don’t think) any language is going to teach rationality any better than any other. It’s not like programming changes very much, for most purposes, it’s just different syntax.
Just because you can code in C++ the way you coded in C doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do so. Programming changes faster than most programmers do. The “just different syntax” statement is true for scripting languages, but not for programming languages.
You will see this practically the instant you start optimizing your code for performance scaling or modularity or whatever.
My personal recommendation is Visual Basic, assuming you use Excel for anything beyond recording what you ate for breakfast. VB extends the functionality of it ten fold, if you know a few basic things. It has the added bonus of being a very easy language to learn, the syntax is pretty much English. That being said, no company is ever going to use VB as a real programming language, but it sounds like employment is not your goal.
Edit: Also, it’s important to note that (at least I don’t think) any language is going to teach rationality any better than any other. It’s not like programming changes very much, for most purposes, it’s just different syntax.
Surprisingly, a lot of Wall Street uses VB for automating models. It’s a dirty little secret but I’ve known people highly paid to do this.
Just because you can code in C++ the way you coded in C doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do so. Programming changes faster than most programmers do. The “just different syntax” statement is true for scripting languages, but not for programming languages.
You will see this practically the instant you start optimizing your code for performance scaling or modularity or whatever.