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.
Wow, TI-Basic. Now that is trip down memory lane to my middle/HS math classes 🤓
Ohh, TI-Basic, that brings back memories to my TI-84. :D
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.
My first language was JS. I had broken my back and was stuck in bed for a while. I got bored with my games and decided I wanted to mod Minecraft. At the time I didn't know that Java and JS were different. A year later and I was learning C++ and PHP. My first language used professionally was PHP During the PHP 5 years. I started using PHP 5 to build small websites for companies in my area that allowed them to modify content on their page. No framework. Just what was bad authentication, PHP rendered pages, and a database connection to grab content from the MYSQL server on the LAMP server I setup. I had about 1 site per month that I built for someone. I've now been in the industry for 8 years. 6 of which have been professional.
Perl, it was the late 90's and I needed something to distill large text files with regular expressions.
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.