Good HLL to learn? (I want to learn a HLL that can land me a job without a college degree.)

Question

Hi Im learning C at the moment,I can program a bit in python,Basic and reading allot about C# at the moment. C seems pretty straight forward,what should I learn next? What is a good HLL that could land me a job if I teach myself from books and pdf's and practice everday for the next three years? Im going to college or university next year and I will be doing a very boring course B.A Socia Dynamics for the next three years,my marks are to bad to get into the maths and programing course...I'm going to have lots of extra time to work on learning programming. I plan on getting a part time unpaid internship job as soon as I feel I can program well enough to gain some experience,what would be a good programming language to start with? A friend who is working for some company that developes web apps for social networking sites recommended Ruby and Rails or Python, he has got no formal programming education,he is a real whizz...he wrote a program in primary school that sends text messages to parents when a learner is absent from school. I really like programming and am just wondering if there are real programming jobs availble for programmers without a college degree. I can work in Php,mysql and html but not really into the web developement thing.

Answer 1

Being able to develop software is not about learning a specific language -- that's the easy part.

Unless you understand at least college-level math (equations, statistics), algorithmic complexity, basics of information theory, relational databases, computational models, data structures and the general make-up of modern computers and networks then working as software developer won't be much fun.

Granted, you don't have to learn all that in college but doing it by yourself without professional guidance will be quite of a challenge. There are a lot of good posts here on Stack Overflow about professional development, take a look around. One example that caught my eye is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/895165/what-undergraduate-computer-science-course-best-prepares-programmers-for-the-work