#2 English- Obviously if you are reading this blog entry you already have a decent grasp of English, but it never hurts to improve your ability to write or communicate effectively which is one of the reasons why English made it on the list. It is estimated that over 1 billion people in the world speak this language. English as a second language has built a reputation of having difficult grammar and containing many irregular spellings or pronunciations. English may be a difficult language to grasp, but its the means through which much of the academic world communicate their findings. This makes understanding the ins and outs of English extremely vital to many career paths such engineering, medicine, astronomy, and architecture. English may have been beaten out by Chinese as the most spoken language of the world, but English does claim the title of "most used language on the Internet." With how quickly modern society has adopted the Internet and the how massive a role that the Internet plays in global communication, the "Most used language on the Internet" is indeed quite a title.
#1 C++(or any other related computing language)- You may be wondering why English did not claim the #1 spot as the top language. With the recent forthcoming of computers and the Internet, technology has quickly embedded itself deeply into our daily lives. These days its hard to find anyone who doesn't use Excel to budget, Google to..well..google, or Facebook to socialize, but many don't think about what it actually takes to make all of these pieces of software run. A computer language is required to translate the abstract ideas we humans think up into the sets of 1's and 0's that machines know how to execute. I'm not sure if anyone here remembers geometry proofs, but writing things for a stupid little CPU to understand is alot like those proofs. Let's see if this little exercise sparks any memories. Imagine you are hungry and want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. What would you do? You would walk out of your room, go into the kitchen and make yourself some PB&J. Most would be able to do this simple task without even thinking. Now imagine how you would explain making a PB&J sandwich to a photosynthesizing alien who has no understanding of what food even is. If anyone has ever taken Mrs Sharpe's geometry class at Powell Highschool, you will know that this task is not easy as it sounds. In order to get the alien to under stand the process of making a sandwich one would have to give a detailed set of instructions to the alien defining each of the actions he should take. You would need to tell him where the bread was located, how to get the bread out of the bag, and how to seal the bag up. In order to prevent redundancy you would tailor your set of instructions to what basic actions the alien already knows. If the alien already understands how to open the fridge, then you would not need to explicitly state that he/she/it needs to place its appendage on the fridge handle, grasp firmly, and pull. A detailed set of instructions similar to that given to the alien is what is needed to be sent to a computer when people decide they want create major applications like Excel or Facebook. Basically all a machine knows how to do is very rudimentary operations like addition or looping. In order to get a machine to understand what "Open this window" or "Post my status" means, someone has to explicitly define it in simpler terms using a language like C++. Now one might feel that professionals take care of programming and learning it for yourself is pointless, however, when computing begins to surround you, knowing at least a little bit of a computers language becomes almost becomes unavoidable. I am not saying go out and be the next Bill Gates or Steve jobs, but obviously, they did something right with their careers by learning to program. It is something that will come out to be very useful for anyone in our technological future.
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