Hello 
I started learning to code a while back but found that there was just so much to sift through in terms of picking a clear starting point. The options ranged from focussing on frontend, to getting my AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification.
Iāve now focussed all my attention on learning Go and am really enjoying it but am curious to know if you could start learning from the beginning, where you might start and why?
Hmmm ā¦ I started with 8080 assembler, BASIC, dBase II and COBOL.
In our assembler class we acted out how a CPU works, even to the extent of someone being assigned to say, āTick.ā
Despite the so-called dangers of BASIC, itās still going strong at places like Anywhere Software where products like B4A, B4I and B4J are being used to build software for iOS, Android and desktop devices.
Despite the nay-sayers, COBOL can still provide its practioners with a lucrative career. Hey, weāve even got a track going for it on Exercism!
dBase II has gone through many changes but is still a strong development tool and is currently represented by X#, xHarbour and Xbase++ (among others).
I get the odd question from folk who ask me what language they should learn. I usually ask them to rephrase the question as what languages they should learn, and then I suggest taking one from each of the major language families, e.g. FORTH, LISP, functional, logic, declarative etc. Each will teach a problem-solving approach and when youāre trying to get a job, having a few skills under your belt is worthwhile.
Think of it this way: if youāre a labourer and you turn up to a building site and say that all you know how to use is a shovel, you probably wonāt get a job there. But if you turn up with varying levels of skills in shovel, pick, wheelbarrow, cement mixer, screed, level, hammer, screwdriver, and nailgun then your likelihood of being employed there is considerably higher.
Of course, everyone wants to know what the failure-free entry point into the field is. Short answer: there isnāt one. Language fads come and go, so spread the risk by learning a few.
Iām not sure that Go is the easiest language to start out with. But what is a good language to start with? I think there are lost of aspects to what makes a language good to start with:
Taking these criteria into account, my suggestion would probably be Python.
Or FORTH (or one of its dialects, like 8th). FORTHs donāt have a lot of syntax; they can be both high and low-level; theyāre imperative; thereās plenty of documentation; there are many communities; most are interpreted but many can be compiled; and there is support in many IDEs. The counter-claims are the Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) syntax and the stack-based calling convention.
I think it really depends on what your goals for learning a language are.
Since programming skills are transferrable between languages ā every language will have at least something you can learn and apply elsewhere ā in the end, the best language to learn is the one that keeps your attention the longest. It took me a lot of false starts with languages like Python and C++ before I found Scheme, which has a paradigm and syntax style I found a lot easier to work with, and with the knowledge I picked up learning it I was able to go back and bolster my skills in the languages I had trouble getting a handle on.
Hey @jimpjorps - thanks for your considered and helpful response, I really appreciate it!
Iāll certainly try take a look at some of those recommendations youāve made as am intrigued to get a deep understanding. Invariably, I started to look at coding purely as it was a pragmatic and sought after skill, but am realising that underpinning the skill, is so much content and thinking
Ideally, the one that you have the most fun in!
If youāre desperate for a job and have a specific field you can enter, then learning a specific language might make the most sense, but ideally you want a language that you can feel competent and comfortable in as quickly as possible, and where you can just discover the joy or programming.
The language should ideally get out of the way and let you start learning to problem-solve using code, not give you more to learn. It should be as obvious and straightforward and simple as possible, and teach you as little Computer Science as it can get away with. Then as you grow and the fundamentals feel less like a game of Jenga it can introduce other ideas and start to teach you more about how languages can be powerful.[1]
Part of choosing that language is then probably about what feels fun. Want to mess around with real world things like Arduinos or Rasperry Piās, then choose something (e.g. Python) thatās great for that. Want to do animations - maybe start with (modern) CSS[2] then move to something more powerful like JavaScript. If you want to make games, then find some basic scripting language like LUA that you can find good tutorials for.
Fundamentally, whatās going to get you to the point of being a programmer isnāt the language itself, its the fact that you can muster enough willpower and self-efficacy to keep going, and the more fun (and less frustration) youāre immediately having, the more likely youāll achieve that 
[1] (Thereās a small [tiny really - almost not worth talking about], chance that weāre currently writing our own language to achieve this 
)
[2] CSS might sound like a terrible choice, but you can use variables and functions in it, so as a way to grasp some fundamentals in a very restricted but immediately useful way, why not?
My first programming language was QuickBASIC 4.5, which I taught myself in the early 90ās from the book that came with the media (Learn BASIC Now, it was called.) After all, BASIC stands for āBeginnerās All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Codeā, so it was made for beginners. Visual Basic .Net might be considered the contemporary equivalent, although it is more complex than the earlier BASIC, and is also somewhat of a second-class citizen behind C# for the .Net platform.
Some people might recommend C as a first language so you start with an understanding of how memory is handled. They see the learning process as starting with the low-level details and building up from there. Others might recommend starting with a garbage-collected language as being simpler, and trying manual memory management later. They see the learning process as starting at a higher level and then drilling down into the details.
So, what language you choose might depend on what learning style you prefer.
I think any language can be a good first language, but at the same time, I think in a way, they are all bad. So my advice would be to pick one that sounds fun and can do something you want to do and go from there.
The way I see it, the perfect good first language for learning ideally would:
Looking at the languages I know, I feel all of them fail in at least one of these points, which makes it hard to recommend just 1 language. Ideally, if you are starting to learn to program, you would learn more than one language, so that you are exposed and can put into practice more concepts. But thatās not realistic, since learning to program and learning the first language is already overwhelming as it is, the last thing you need at that point is someone telling you ābtw, also learn language Xā.
With that said, my recommendation for a first language would be Python. Despite not being a perfect first language, why I think Python is probably the best option:
The shortcomings of Python as a first language:
mypy to actually check your type annotations, Python will ignore them by default. This makes it so transitioning to a statically typed one will not be as smooth as it could be.In the end, no language is a perfect first language, so Iād say to pick something that is fun. Any language one chooses will have shortcomings and hurdles. In my opinion, the success of learning to program and learning a first programming language has more to do with factors like motivation and looking past those hurdles than with the language itself that is chosen.
I would say python, because of its strict syntax and very good error handling. The language syntax is fairly easy to understand and there is a lot of libraries for it so you can do a lot of stuff.
Although if you have experience in html/css you may want to get into javascript/typescript. Since that is more or less a requirement for frontend. Although javascript has some weird syntax which can be hard to understand.
I seccond python 
Itās really easy to learn the syntax, which enables you to learn basic programming concepts which you can later transfer to working in other languages.
Itās particularly nice for a newbie to work with python and django to start building web apps (which then incorporates the javascript, HTML, and CSS)
The question is incorrectly formulated. What do we understand by the term ābeginnerā? A 5-year-old person or a 50-year-old computer user who wants to learn how to program? The answer will be different and it will be based on a specific person. For a child 5-10 years old, my answer is Scratch, a simple online editor in which you drag blocks and see your program, as well as the result of its work immediately.
For a 15-25 year old student, the answer is āwhat do you need? what is the name of your course?ā and here the choice is huge: Python, JavaScript, C/C#, Ruby, etc., thousands of them. For an elderly person about 50 years old, their parameters are important and Lisp, C/C#, Rust, Haskell and others are quite possible here. So there will be no right answer to this question.
Unexpectedly, the most correct answer to this question is Russian education, the student is offered a choice of 4 languages: 1) Python, 2) C, 3) Pascal, 4) algorithmic language. And this is like a starting point, after which a person can go his own way.
I donāt think Rust belongs to the old people, I am 26 and learning it. Itās highly used in blockchain.
I didnāt mean that Rust would be interesting only to old people. This is a complex language and I would not recommend learning it first. As for the blockchain, my choice is Solidity, it is simple, effective and created specifically for it. If you are 26 age and you are already studying Rust, then I can say: bravo! Good luck and good code!
I do not think student age considerations are at all useful, past 12ā16 years of age and quite possibly (much?) younger. In my experience, once someone wants to learn a specific programming language, they totally can, regardless of age or language.
It seems to me motivation is so important that it outweights almost all other factors, except insofar as they might reduce motivation.
Also, that Haskell be a ācomplexā language is an unhelpful myth. I will not debate the issue here (as it is off-topic), except to ā relevantly ā point out that (relatively) many have learnt it as their first programming language. (One prominent example.) The same probably goes for other ācomplexā programming languages. Indeed, I reckon the situation is similar to the one with spoken languages: all are roughly equally complex (at the equilibrium balancing compactness and comprehensibility), but the way this complexity is distributed varies from languages to language. (See also: English from the Ukrainian POV, analogous to āexoticā programming languages seen through the eyes of users of ānormalā ones.)
Thanks, yes Rust is a complex language for beginners and has a longer learning curve, Solidity is good for Ethirum-based blockchains. But, Rust has some unique features like its memory management, optimization, and speed so I chose it as I also have prior experience in Java so itās not that tough to learn.
I feel I ought to make a case for Clojure but, well I havenāt personally reached a level where I can demonstrably say āIt worked for me!ā.
But thatās ok, because other people have. In fact itās the whole premise that Clojurebridge (which follows the railsbridge model) is based upon:
Clojure is a relatively new programming language that values simplicity, expressiveness, and practicality. The simplicity of the language makes it excellent to learn if you are new to programming and a pleasure to use, either way. Its expressiveness and practicality make it a language that gives you a lot of power to turn your ideas into working software.
I can, however, speak to why it happens to click with my brain, and why Iāve continued to stick with it despite its admittedly abysmal job market. Donāt get me wrong - there are actually plenty of Clojure jobs out thereā¦ if youāre already a mega-genius with 10+ years of experience. But I donāt make life decisions based on financial incentives because I hate money.
In a word: interactivity.
Jack Rusher recently explained it better than I ever could in his talk
Stop Writing Dead Programs, Strange Loop 2022 (jackrusher.com), but to get a quick taste of what I mean, thereās a demo I made earlier this year for a Clojure TDD library.
Itās interesting to note that Clojure devs arenāt generally very enthusiastic about Test-Driven Development, because we have REPL-Driven Development (a concept which has made its way into F#) which kind of makes that workflow unnecessary, since writing Clojure involves a unique process of arbitrarily evaluating tiny bits of code from within your editor.
This is almost impossible to explain with words, you really have to see it in action. But itās totally Clojureās killer feature that makes me feel like Iām coding in the dark when I try to use any other language. Your program is a living thing that you can introspect however you like, which allows you to wrap your head around the code in tiny, digestible pieces instead of having to trace the entire flow of execution in your head.
It depends of course but in general I would recommend Elm.
Some pros are:
Someone mentioned that beginners tend to think more in ways closer to how imperative programs and therefore functional programming languages can be trickier but Iām not entirely sold on that. I donāt have any data to back any statements up but Iāve heard many who has done a lot of math find non-imperative languages such as Elm quite intuitive. Iāve also heard people teaching Elm to both first time coders and experienced coders that in some aspects itās more difficult to teach the experienced coders (if their experience is mainly from imperative langs) than to the first timer. Maybe there is something to that, maybe not. My first lang at university was a FP-lang, a Lisp, and I think that was a good language to start with. Iām not saying there is a strong advantage of learning FP before imperative but I donāt think it should be discouraged if done right.
Another good beginner language that might already be the first contact for most people is Excel :D
@jonathanmiddleton it seems you might still remember being a complete beginner. (I have forgotten, surprisingly thoroughly, as have many.) What do you reckon are the most helpful kinds of answers to your kind of question?
Firstly, thank you all so much for the in depth responses and considered breakdown of why youād recommend certain languages.
Iāve really enjoyed reading through all the comments and feel that there has been a really wide range of languages recommended.
On reflecting about @MatthijsBlom question, one of the biggest challenges I faced when starting out on the programming journey was conceptualising how a language practically interfaces with the real worldā¦if that makes sense? The bridge between the theory and the practical implementation always felt quite wide in difficult to bridge.
As such, the responses that I feel I connect well with, are the responses that have connected a real-world application, with the rational for why a specific language makes sense.
Interestingly, I started learning Go because I had a friend who raved about it. In all honesty, many of the reasons he liked it flew right over my head. But as Iāve learnt about what happens on a really low level (e.g. how memory is apportioned and used), itās allowed the language to be much more understandable.
The reality though, is that learning something new is challenging, but Iām so excited and grateful for the different perspectives shown in this thread and feel that I could make a much better decision about what language I would want to start out with, based on all the comments above.
Iāve realised, that I enjoy a strict compiler though, and that I have many preconceptions that still affect which languages I think Iād enjoy. Definitely the next step is to work through all the languages in this thread using Exercism and then maybe I can give my own piece of advice to another lucky person!