Which language should I start with?

Last updated: 0000-00-00 00:00:00

There are numerous choices in programming language these days, and that's a good thing - it is easy to find a language that suites the kind of program you want to write. This article discusses a number of languages outlining their appropriateness as a learning language, and the types of projects they are suited for.

A better name for this article is "How to choose a good language to start with..."

I would like to have an easy answer about which language to start with, and I kinda, sorta do: ANY language is a good language to start with! That's right. As long as you have a way to program in that language and a computer to program on and some learning instructions you will learn something, and that's a start.

However, you if you have some idea of the kind of programs you want to write, or maybe you want to take this very seriously, you can do a little research and pick a good language to get your feet wet and at the same time move you directly toward the things you want to do. But remember, ANY programming you do will move you along in your study

So I will assume that you have an idea of the direction you want to go.

But first, a word about Web programming

A lot of beginning programmers are very interested in doing stuff for the internet. Although Web programming covers a lot of stuff (it isn't just getting a little content onto a web page), for someone just starting, there are some things you are gonning to have to start learning about right from the start:

• HTML - the basic building block of the internet
• Javascript - used for a lot of things, but is very important for dynamic client-side programming
• Some kind of server-side programming: popular starting places include PHP, ASP with VbScript, JSP, and ASP.NET with C# or VB.Net.
• CSS - Cascading Style Sheets are getting importanter and importanter, so you'll want to add this to the mix as you go.
• Java - if you stick with web programming, you likely will end up learning Java sooner or later

So where do you start? In a nutshell, Learn some HTML, decide on a server-side technology and start learning it, add in some Javascript, and somewhere along the way start working with CSS. I have a whole article on this (or will soon and I'll put a link to it here when it is ready).

And then there is everything else...

Well, there are numerous areas of interest: Game programming, business applications, scientific programs, number crunching, utilities... the list goes on and on (actually, I was running out of ideas there, but I know there are numerous other options). You might even want to write operating systems, device drivers, programming languages, compilers, graphics editors, file compressors and other 'low-level' applications.

So what should we look at in a language? One good criteria is to choose a generally accepted, commercially used language: These are the languages that have been proven to be useful, powerful, dependable, stable, and in most cases, versitle. To some degree, these languages are usually easy enough to learn - especially when you consider that thousands and thousand of programmers, most of them no smarter than you or me, have been able to learn them. We can call these the "main stream" langauges. These languages include Java, C#, VB.NET, Visual Basic 6, Delphi, Ruby, among others, but these are the ones we'll focus on for this section.