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Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Printable Version

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Which is the best programming language to learn first? - derailed - April 25th, 2014

During high school, my programming teacher only taught us C++, and she always told us that this language is the "foundation" or programming, and that if you know it, you will eventually know any other languages too. But in my opinion they're still a bit different, and also require a lot of practice.

What do you think? Which is the best programming language to learn first?


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Darth-Apple - April 25th, 2014

Not C++ unless you can handle it. Tongue

Python is a pretty beginner friendly language. Call me insane, but I actually don't mind PHP either.


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Urban - April 11th, 2015

PHP and Java.


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - SpookyZalost - May 25th, 2017

I'm with hans, Python, made better because with python, some parts, and a raspberry pi you can literally make anything.


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Darth-Apple - May 26th, 2017

All this talk about the raspberry pi makes me want one man... I think I'm gonna order one tomorrow.

What model of it do you have?


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - SpookyZalost - May 27th, 2017

(May 26th, 2017 at 9:30 PM)Hans Squeaky Wrote: All this talk about the raspberry pi makes me want one man... I think I'm gonna order one tomorrow.

What model of it do you have?

1 pi 2, 2 pi 3's and a few pi zero's and pi zero W's.

depends on the project.

I recently upgraded the CPU in my wearable computer to a Pi 3b for the extra CPU's and ram.


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - effone - February 13th, 2019

In childhood days I got first programming essence in my life by writing a Windows batch file Big Grin


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Guardian - February 13th, 2019

(February 13th, 2019 at 8:48 AM)effone Wrote: In childhood days I got first programming essence in my life by writing a Windows batch file Big Grin

Ah, good ol' batch file days. I use to mess with people with them. Fun startup options and disguising them as Internet Explorer.  Tongue


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Thomas - February 14th, 2019

PYYYYTHONNNNN


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Darth-Apple - February 14th, 2019

I created a scheduled task and duplicated it a large number of times on a work computer once, and its purpose was to continuously open internet explorer windows. People would keep trying to close them and they'd keep popping back up, about one every 30 seconds. It was great. Finna

Re: @Thomas - Yes - Python is probably one of the simplest languages I've ever attempted to use! It's very refreshing and significantly less time-consuming to write code as opposed to, say, Java. Tongue


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - SpookyZalost - February 16th, 2019

I'd like to update my statement lol.

Python, Basic, C++... and HTML 5/CSS.

why the last one?

because you can literally program games in HTML 5 and have them run on your website lol.


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Lain - February 27th, 2019

(April 25th, 2014 at 8:09 PM)derailed Wrote: During high school, my programming teacher only taught us C++, and she always told us that this language is the "foundation" or programming, and that if you know it, you will eventually know any other languages too. But in my opinion they're still a bit different, and also require a lot of practice.

What do you think? Which is the best programming language to learn first?

C++ is only foundational for OOP and learning how to use a compiler. Literally nothing else.

C is a lot more foundational in the sense that it follows a more procedural approach by default but you can also write it as a more functional style, not to mention the gcc is insanely optimized so it'll run ultra-fast. The tradeoff is that it's a very small language, so although memorizing it will take you an afternoon, it will take you much longer to write anything useful. Also, it's rather unsafe in the sense that it doesn't do garbage collection on its own, you can play with memory directly, and most standard library stuff doesn't do input sanitation, so you need to implement stuff like that yourself.

If I were going to recommend you a language to start off with, it would be a tie between C and Python. As mentioned, C will get you all the foundational knowledge you need (and when things break, you'll have to go lower-level to assembly and bytecode to figure out exactly why something went wrong.) You'll learn a lot more in the long-run.

As for Python, the only reason I really recommend it is that it's easy. It reads like English. It can be written in any style, really (procedural, functional, OO if you really want.) It can run decently fast, you usually don't need to f*** with interpreter options. There is a massive community for it too, so when it gets down to finding how to do something, there's a good chance the question has been asked on StackExchange, and there's also probably a library dedicated to doing that. You can write programs that work a lot faster, but the tradeoff is that you don't really learn about what goes on behind the scenes until you get to CPython and the native interface.


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - bestforums - April 19th, 2019

Python and C++ in my opinion


RE: Which is the best programming language to learn first? - Divya165 - October 28th, 2020

I learned HTML, c, c++ and PHP. One of the favorite programming language.