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Another option would be French or German. If you work for an American or Canadian aerospace firm and you can understand what they're saying behind your back. .
Does programming in C++ qualify as a foreign language?
LOL!
In all seriousness though, I highly recommend against learning C++ if you're going into aerospace engineering unless you plan on working in the software side of things, and by software, I mean testing.
In all the years of sitting in front of a computer I've yet to run into a real coding in a language.
I say that because all the C++ code out there I've seen were coded by foreign (outside the US) workers who were basically code monkeys writing tests. And you don't want to be a code monkey. Tedious. But do learn it eventually.
MATLAB and Simulink are not languages - they are a scripting and a visual-based script language, respectively. Learn those way before you learn C++ or any "real" programming language. Boeing uses it. Lockheed uses it. Northrup Grumman uses it. The Office of Naval Research and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research both use it.
However, if you go into pure aerodynamics, there's a chance you might run into it, but you'll sadly run into more Fortran than C/C++, since a lot (surprisingly A LOT) of the code out there was written in the 60s and 70s and FORTRAN was it.
Some old military stuff deals with Ada.
At any rate, do learn MATLAB/Simulink first and then a "real" coding language, and hold off learning Ada. It's a dead language for all intents and purposes, and FORTRAN is nice to know but even the ancient code out there is being converted.
Commercial
Airbus – Aircraft: A320, A330, A340, A350 XWB
Boeing – Aircraft: 787, 777, 767,757, 747-400, 737-200, (and others)
Canadian Air – Aircraft: Regional Jet
Fokker – Aircraft: F 100
Ilyushin – Aircraft: II-96M
Raytheon – Aircraft: Beechjet 400A (business jet)
ULA – Atlas and Delta Expendable Launch Vehicles
Barco – Advanced Jet Avionics Display
Military
BAE Systems – Aircraft: Harrier, Hawk
Boeing – K767 Tanker, C130 AMP, AH-64 Apache
EADS – Aircraft: Tornado, A330 MRTT, nEUROn (UAV)
Eurocopter – Aircraft: Tiger and NH90 helicopters
Eurofighter GmbH – Aircraft: Eurofighter
Lockheed Martin – Aircraft: F-16, F-22, C-130J
Martin Baker – Aircraft: F14, F18 and T-45
Saab JAS 39 Gripen (Flight Control systems upgraded to Ada in 1996)
I'm currently an Aerospace Engineering student and will be finishing up in about ~3 or 4 semesters. Anyways, I love foreign languages and I am looking for a good language that could really help me out for that career.
I already speak both Spanish and Portuguese and I'm looking to maybe take a couple classes and add another one on the list that could be beneficial for me. Right now I'm thinking something between German and Chinese. Not entirely sure though, any ideas?
I thought about Russian, but there's nothing that fits in my schedule.
German and Chinese are the first two that came to my mind.
German because I have a friend who sells medical equipment (she makes a high salary--it's stuff like MRI machines and brain scanners) and she travels to Europe a lot. She says she wishes she spoke German because that seems to be a language that the technology world is centered around. In your line of work, you might find German to be an advantage.
And Chinese because so much of our economy is tied to theirs. I don't think people even realize how much, even though they joke about everything of ours being made in China. Not far from the truth. Even moreso, though, the Chinese are designing and building things on a rapid scale. The country is growing into the 21st century by leaps and bounds. 12,000 American college students are studying over there right now--my daughter was one of them last fall, and while the cultural gap between us still exists, the business and technology worlds are drawing ever closer.
Commercial
Airbus – Aircraft: A320, A330, A340, A350 XWB
Boeing – Aircraft: 787, 777, 767,757, 747-400, 737-200, (and others)
Canadian Air – Aircraft: Regional Jet
Fokker – Aircraft: F 100
Ilyushin – Aircraft: II-96M
Raytheon – Aircraft: Beechjet 400A (business jet)
ULA – Atlas and Delta Expendable Launch Vehicles
Barco – Advanced Jet Avionics Display
Military
BAE Systems – Aircraft: Harrier, Hawk
Boeing – K767 Tanker, C130 AMP, AH-64 Apache
EADS – Aircraft: Tornado, A330 MRTT, nEUROn (UAV)
Eurocopter – Aircraft: Tiger and NH90 helicopters
Eurofighter GmbH – Aircraft: Eurofighter
Lockheed Martin – Aircraft: F-16, F-22, C-130J
Martin Baker – Aircraft: F14, F18 and T-45
Saab JAS 39 Gripen (Flight Control systems upgraded to Ada in 1996)
Funny you should mention that. I've worked on many of these airplanes. And I repeat: I've never run into Ada or C/C++, but I think this is partly due to the role you play. On a side note: a lot of the newer airplanes are autocoded into Ada and compiled that way yes, but if you look at the guts of it, all the strongly typed aspects of Ada are blown away and it operates more like C. The regulations haven't caught up with the technology in the least.
If you're a coder and you see the autocode is in C/C++, and your testing platform runs on compiled C/C++, then naturally you code in C/C++. Same with Ada.
I'm just saying if you want to be a tester, go ahead and learn it. But before you learn it, learn higher-level scripting languages first.
All the aerospace companies and many of their suppliers are going to Matlab/Simulink or one of their competitors (notably LabView is absent, partly because there's little testing support, though I have heard of one company using it and simply testing the autocode output).
And you may need to know it if say you are trying to build an autocoder that conforms to DO-178B or a MIL standard. But most companies have already done this, and it takes a LOT of testing and resources to prove your autocoder is truly repetitive, so small time companies usually don't play with it.
At any rate, if you want to be the one writing the specs and doing the modeling of and autocoding of the models for these airplanes, don't learn C/C++ first. Know it to debug if you're doing embedded testing or HIL, but that's basically it. The people writing the specs and the models tend to learn more about the airplanes as systems and get paid better too. Just my $0.02.
I'm currently an Aerospace Engineering student and will be finishing up in about ~3 or 4 semesters. Anyways, I love foreign languages and I am looking for a good language that could really help me out for that career.
I already speak both Spanish and Portuguese and I'm looking to maybe take a couple classes and add another one on the list that could be beneficial for me. Right now I'm thinking something between German and Chinese. Not entirely sure though, any ideas?
I thought about Russian, but there's nothing that fits in my schedule.
i'm an electronics and telecommunication engineering student. which language is good for me, German or french and why?
Germans love engineers, and roll out the red carpet for them, including a residency/work visa, if you want one. I don't know about France. But it seems like the cutting edge high-quality work is being done in Germany, and maybe to some extent in Switzerland.
Are you any good at languages? What language did you take in HS? It's kind of funny how people always have this either-or mentality about choosing a language. Nobody said you couldn't take both. German is more challenging for making the transition from a conversational level to reading newspapers and technical articles, as you would be if your profession involved a German connection. You'd have to try to get some specialized advanced courses in school to prepare you for that, or try the Goethe Institute, which offers German classes in cities around the US, and can tailor classes to a small group's interest.
It requires some talent to learn Chinese as an adult.
There are next to zero cognates with English, and even new words like computer, molecule, and laser have nothing to do with English (they made new words with Chinese roots). A lot of things to memorize.
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