Pros: popular and commonly used; good for data science Cons: roughly the same paradigm and Javascript. weak/dynamic/duck typed, interpreted, garbage-collected.

I'd recommend learning a language that departs from one or more of those. Maybe learn a statically-typed language, or a functional language. If you're up for a bit of a challenge, learn Rust. It's strongly typed, compiled, and definitely NOT garbage collected. It's possible to get a running program very quickly, but the learning curve steepens after that.

If you do want to try Rust, here's some starting points

- https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/

- https://stevedonovan.github.io/rust-gentle-intro/readme.html

- https://www.lurklurk.org/effective-rust/intro.html

- https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust