For someone getting into VFX programming (not me!), what do you think the most important languages to know are? And why?
There are some obvious answers, but I'll let them come out in the answers to this question.
Andrew Marshall
[ Editor ]
I would generally agree about C style languages, with the caveat that most good programmers will be familiar with a wide variety of languages, environments and coding patterns. Good programming is about problem solving and analysis, principles that are largely language agnostic.
MEL maybe on its way out now, but 7-8 years ago this was not the case. Who cans say what role python will be playing in 7-8 years time? Programmers need to be able to adapt accordingly.
Although I completely agree with programming skills and problem solving being language agnostic, I see the growing tendency of using object oriented programming. And while MEL is a nice script language, the lack of OO support is a big limitation compared to Python. And since all MEL commands are just a subset of Python’s (after all you can call any command from both languages), its just a matter of time and taste which language one would use more for a task. I see myself using more and more Python, just because of the ease of higher level datatypes, IO and QT support.