<p>I am a rising junior, my school year just ended so I want to learn a programming language over summer and keep on getting better through out my junior year so I can apply for some science lab internship for summer 2014 before my senior year.</p>
<p>So my questions are what is the best language to learn if I want to make programs for science lab? and how long would it take to become proficient enough to make programs for science lab? is better to learn using a book or web site like edx, codecademy etc?thanks</p>
<p>Depends on what the school uses - usually it could be Matlab or similar, if you’re doing analysis type work. At the lower level if you want to do work where lab instruments talk to each other then something like C or C++ would work better.</p>
<p>I would hedge my bets and learn a little bit C and a little Matlab. I would not bother with C++ early on, learn the basics first then worry about the ++ part.</p>
<p>But then, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like… My wife worked on a manufacturing system where everything (from lowly instruments to house sized machinery) talked to each other via messages, and the whole thing was written in Python…</p>
<p>You want to find a summer internship outside your high school after junior year. It will be hard to predict the program the lab uses unless you check it out in advance. Maybe just learn programming in general and have some knowledge so you can claim that you are not totally unfamiliar with the subject. I don’t think there are any courses this summer on Coursera and edX that fit your needs. Maybe check out other places, like Udacity, MIT OPenCourseWare, etc. Start with something simple, like Python. Your other option is to take high school AP SC in junior year (Java).</p>
<p>I have used Matlab for over 20 years but I am slowly switching over to doing most of my simulation work in Python. With numpy and other extensions, I find Python a lot more versatile than Matlab and it is free. I think one of MIT’s online programming class uses Python.</p>
<p>It may be too much too soon, but another possibility along the lines of Python and NumPy is Java and Apache Commons Math. I was using that a lot a few years ago.</p>
<p>I honestly had no idea Python had gotten so advanced. I tried it out a few years ago and concluded it was just a Perl-ish hacker language.</p>