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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: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 24 2015, @08:51AM
In the diagram, in the "Just want to get started" section, there's the final decision "I prefer to learn things ..." with the options (besides others) "the slightly harder way" and "the really hard way". On "the slightly harder way" you find (after another decision split) "C", on "the really hard way" C++.
This is wrong. To completely master C++ is certainly much harder than to completerly master C, and to understand C++ programs written by others can be much harder than understanding C programs written by others. But for learning, you'll mane much easier progress with C++ than with C because you can defer the really hard stuff (like memory management) to much later (you can accomplish quite a lot in C++ without ever having to explicitly manage memory or deal with visible pointers). On the other hand, in C you cannot get very far without learning those concepts.
The huge number of features in C++ doesn't matter that much for learning because you're not going to use features which you didn't learn about yet. However you'll be able to different programming styles without having to relearn the basics exactly because C++ is so feature rich.
Is C++ the best possible programming language? Certainly not. And as a beginner, you most probably are better off starting with Python than with C++. I just disagree with the assessment that starting with C++ is harder than starting with C.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.