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Blogger Carl Cheo, who maintains a website providing numbered lists of tips for maximizing online productivity, has pulled together an easy-to-follow graphic answering the newbie question "What programming language should I learn first?" (pdf here). Cheo chose nine commercially viable languages as possible destinations as the viewer navigates the flow chart. Further down the page, there are tabs with annotated links to educational resources for each language. So what's in it for Soylentils, most of whom I'm guessing were programming newbies in the previous millenium? Well, maybe you have nephews or nieces who chose the wrong major in college. Besides, the graphic is amusing and clever, though probably not the last word on the subject.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Saturday January 24 2015, @08:00AM
I was actually going to suggest Javascript when I saw your posting. It's simple, reasonably clean, but immensely powerful as a scripting language goes. One does not have to use it in a browser after all. My favorite scripting language is Groovy but that's because I'm a Java shill. I prefer working in the Java runtime environment and Groovy makes that very easy for someone who already knows Java.
I think the I would suggest any scripting language so the novice doesn't have to worry about data types so much, then migrate to something like Java that does. After that then go to Objective C. C++ is just plain nasty.
Having said all this, I am a far better programmer because I took the time to learn how to write assembly language programs for a variety of machines: Control Data 6000 and its successors (RISC before the term was coined), TI 9900, PDP-11, and 6502. (I tried learning 8086 assembly but its ugliness turned me off.) Learning to program the machine at such a low level gives the programmer many insights into computers in general that one could perhaps not otherwise obtain.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.