Don't worry too much about the meta-narrative about the culture associated with each of the languages. The surveillance state is being built with python, but a lot of hardware hackers prefer python too. Ruby is praised for its flexibility, but its most successful project is literally called "Ruby on Rails" because it tells you exactly how to do everything.
The way people feel about languages goes in cycles, so it's good to be aware of it, but you can mostly ignore it. Use the best tools for the job. If the job is making computers do things, the best tool is unix :)
I bought an rpi, but could never figure out something to do with it. Any suggestions?
My feeling with languages is that they may go in cycles but it'd be useful to learn either something with a completely different conceptual model (Lisp) or requiring me to understand pointers. But I'd been thinking about trying to lean Unix instead lately.
I feel like I'm pointing a flashlight around a cave with Linux systems. Any advise for some systemic learning? My cs curriculum won't cover anything that applied.
If you don't know either of them yet, I'd suggest vim ;)
> I bought an rpi, but could never figure out something to do with it. Any suggestions?
Pi-hole is a super popular project, maybe give that a try.
> or requiring me to understand pointers
Maybe learn to do some old-school stack smashing? https://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html
There are a bunch of CTFs out there you can play with that help build skills.
> I feel like I'm pointing a flashlight around a cave with Linux systems. Any advise for some systemic learning?
Sounds like you're on the right path :)
Maybe try doing http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/read.html if you really want a deep understanding of how Linux works.
Also, just browsing the Linux documentation is useful: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
