Starting your journey in programming can be an exciting but daunting experience. One of the first decisions you'll make is choosing which programming language to start with.
We want to hear from our newbies and from some of the more experienced community members, too: What was the first programming language you learned, and what programming language(s) are you currently studying?
Top comments (69)
I didn't chose my first language, they were the one we had at school: Matlab, a tiny bit of C and some weird scientific stuff.
Then JS because… well, it did what I wanted. Chose a Rails bootcamp to start coding for real, because it seemed promising, and I liked it a lot. I think it was really cool for learning and wouldn't mind doing some Rails again.
In the end, I got a React/Svelte (and tiny of Python) job… and it's all great too!
So yeah, the one I truly chose was Ruby, but JS kept being the thing to do again and again 🤷
Matlab is indeed great. "Vectorization".
Technically TI-Basic, a language used to program their TI-83/4 calculators.
But I like to say my journey started with Powerpoint 2003 ( : Because I think elementary-aged me picked up on a ton of useful programming paradigms just by messing with animations and button triggers.
Ohh, TI-Basic, that brings back memories to my TI-84. :D
Wow, TI-Basic. Now that is trip down memory lane to my middle/HS math classes 🤓
Well... my first contact with programming was a small HTML tutorial from a magazine in the late 90s when my handdown computer was still a x386 and we used Netscape on a win 3.1 to access the internet. But I'd say my first real programming language was ASP (O.G.). Then in the early 2000s a friend of my father's said that future of internet was Linux and PHP and then I moved on to the LAMP stack... then JS, but those languages I found in my path as a hobbyist web developer.
The first language I CHOSE ro learn by my own was Vala in 2018, an OOP superset that compiles to C. It helped me study OOP programing and kickstart my professional path as a developer.
ZX Spectrum BASIC - because it was just there - as soon as you turned the machine on
This was 1983 - I was 7 years old
Vic20 memories
Also me
C++, I didn't choose, it was the only language taught in my school.
And I still think it is the go to language for anyone who wants to start programming as it teaches the basics of programming and logic building.
I didn't choose, VBA chose me...my first experience with programming was writing Excel macros...it has been downhill from there! 🤣💗
C++ was my first language, because that's what I had access to a book about. There wasn't any Codecademy or CodeNewbie back then so I didn't know better. My next language was Python. That was lucky because if I'd had to deal with pointers and memory management again I might have given up for good. (I wasn't even a teenager yet!) I think it's better to start with a garbage-collected language and move on to manual memory management once you've got a rock-solid understanding of different data types and structures, if ever.
Most recently I learned some Rust to write an extremely performance-sensitive simulation. Rust is a delightful language for people who love to code: internally consistent, safe, and fast, with a compiler that holds your hand and nods encouragingly the whole time.
Started off with C++ because that was what they taught in my college class. However, the day someone from Microsoft visited my class and showcased C# as an upcoming language which I believe was NET Framework 3.5 at the time, it instantly caught my attention.
I went out and bought the "Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform (Windows.net) 4th Edition" book; a whopping 1370 pages and read every page, and worked every exercise and feature in it. I was hooked on the language and started building everything I could.
Today, I still use C# as my main programming language, but typescript is gaining that same appeal for me with its type safety and ability to be used everywhere for web and desktop applications.
The first language I used was bash at school. Then after being interested in coding I picked up python on my own, then changed to Java.
I chose python as it seemed simple enough to learn the basics without all the type and memory nonsense other languages force you to learn. After I learned the basics I went to java and had to learn more about types. I think this is a good way to approach learning coding, first focus on the basics, then start adding more complex topics little by little. This way you don't get as overwhelmed
The first language I wrote code in was Z80 Assembly, because at that time, I had nothing else, I was 8 years old and couldn't afford an extra compiler. The second one was Mallard Basic on an old Schneider Joyce.
I learned a few other languages on the way, including C, X86 assembly, Lua, until I became a developer by profession and was drawn into the abyss of web development, where I first learned and then slowly mastered HTML, CSS and JS (and by extension TS). I still try to learn new stuff now and then; the last thing I picked up as a hobby was Rust. Currently, I'm learning C# for a project.