What's a good, entry-level programming language to learn?

[dave4shmups]

Coding seems to be all the rage these days, and it is definitely something that interests me.  However, don't most, if not all, coding/programming languages require a mathematical mindset?  Because math was my weakest subject in school.  I talked to a friend who makes a living as a computer programmer who told me that you don't have to be good at math in order to get into computer programming.  But he also told me that he majored in math!  If you don't, then my question is-what is the easiest programming language to start out with?

[Gvd cm jk y fnaf]

Well I'm shit at maths and I can manage just fine. So don't worry too much about it.

[TMobile]

I think you don't have to be good at maths but you should be a bit organised  or it might be a mess. I started learning with HTML (5)

[Tamesh16]

5 minutes ago, dave4shmups said:

Coding seems to be all the rage these days, and it is definitely something that interests me.  However, don't most, if not all, coding/programming languages require a mathematical mindset?  Because math was my weakest subject in school.  I talked to a friend who makes a living as a computer programmer who told me that you don't have to be good at math in order to get into computer programming.  But he also told me that he majored in math!  If you don't, then my question is-what is the easiest programming language to start out with?

Generally Programming is more in dept planning of carrying out a task with limited functions , Math only becomes necessary if your tasks require them , for example Heavy Physics in 3d Game designing is the only way that will affect you , But other wise if you want to start Programming You can start as simple as possible with "PASCAL" or go a step further and start "C programming". Honestly A Start With C with the help of Lynda.com and you will be able to start the basics and move off from there into any of your choice 

[MrDrWho13]

Maybe VB, Python, or C#?

You need a logical mind to do programming usually.

[kiritoblank]

C# is an easy to learn language to program as its object oriented and it's kinda widely used. i recommend you don't learn visual basic's language as it's just not used now a days even tho it's probably the easiest language, java is pretty good to start with too.

[barkloaf]

Javascript and Lua is where I started.

[alanoide97]

What are you plannig to do, basic tasks? GUI´s? Games?

Let´s take game development as an example; the Unity Editor can use C# or Javascript, both of them are object oriented, but C# is more widely used, and pretty similar to C+ and C++ so there is some learning path there.

[tikker]

I started out with Java. Nowadays I do all my programming in Python, because of my study and because of Raspberry Pi. I guess I'd recommend Python as a starting language since it's easy to learn, though it also depends on what you want to do.

[dave4shmups]

9 hours ago, tikker said:

I started out with Java. Nowadays I do all my programming in Python, because of my study and because of Raspberry Pi. I guess I'd recommend Python as a starting language since it's easy to learn, though it also depends on what you want to do.

Right now, I just want to try my hand at a programming language to see whether or not I enjoy coding.

[Birdman2246]

It depends on what you are planning on doing. For most people, I recommend Python. It's a very simple and common programming language. As for the mathematical mind set, I've seen people who are great at programming but terrible at math. The difference is most math you know is about crunching numbers, while programming is all about giving a computer step-by-step instructions to follow. A mathematical mindset does help for some things (like programming logic), but for the most part is not needed. 

[tikker]

12 hours ago, dave4shmups said:

Right now, I just want to try my hand at a programming language to see whether or not I enjoy coding.

I'd say go for Python then. It's easy to learn so you can focus more on the programming itself rather than first having to learn all kinds of quirks and technical aspects first.

[dave4shmups]

OK, thanks!

[Dat Guy]

If I were you, I wouldn't start with Python. You'd regret soon. Start with C++ or Perl. The learning curve looks steep, but you can easily apply your knowledge to quite a lot of other languages. Learning Python will not help you to understand anything except Python.

[¨TrisT¨]

C is very challenging. If I knew any better that's where I would have started, if you can program fine in C, the world is your oyster. There will be a lot of new stuff, but you'll be a lot more flexible and it'll be easy to get around your problems.

If you start with say web development in general, and ever want to do c/c++ it'll be very hard on you.

Keep in mind, c# is very different from c or c++ and is only natively compatible with windows.

Java is, in my opinion, just a cesspool of people trying to self promote their libraries and people going the easy way, doing or learning to do things natively on java on your own is hard.

Again, keep in mind java is completely different from javascript, javascript is a part of web development and I wouldn't exactly call it a language.

If you're interested in the java universe, I find android programming quite interesting.

 

But don't take my word for it, I'm learning on my own and I'm fairly uncultured in what goes for technical terms and all around important stuff so I might have picked up bad habits and be wrong about all this. 

[Dat Guy]

13 hours ago, ¨TrisT¨ said:

If you start with say web development in general, and ever want to do c/c++ it'll be very hard on you.

Actually, C/C++ are great web development languages, (almost) all web servers support them (via FastCGI) and they really excel in performance.

[straight_stewie]

On 9/12/2016 at 1:21 PM, dave4shmups said:

Coding seems to be all the rage these days, and it is definitely something that interests me.  However, don't most, if not all, coding/programming languages require a mathematical mindset?  Because math was my weakest subject in school.  I talked to a friend who makes a living as a computer programmer who told me that you don't have to be good at math in order to get into computer programming.  But he also told me that he majored in math!  If you don't, then my question is-what is the easiest programming language to start out with?

Not necessarily. Certainly math is important for solving many problems in computing, but perhaps logic is just as important as math. There are other languages you can learn. For example, HTML is more based around semantically describing the content of a webpage, and CSS is more based around describing the layout of a webpage in relation to it's semantic description.

However, most languages like C, C++, C#, Java, and Python are "general purpose" languages, logic is just as important as math.
On the flip side of that, you have pure mathematical languages like MatLab and Wolfram which contain almost no logic constructs.

Then you have yet other languages like Haskell and F# which are more based around defining a logic or math problem purely mathematically.

Then you have strict scripting languages that are more based around flow control and managing the use of other programs.

Then you have languages that take parts of all or some of the above languages, and mix them all together.

Oh, don't let me forget Assembly Languages, which exist only for machine control: They are how machine instructions are explicitly expressed.

There are many, many, many, languages which you could choose from. Each language has it's own advantages and disadvantages, as well as it's own use cases, and even their own difficulty level. Indeed, there is a programming language to suit almost every mindset, there are even broad types of programming languages that will suit all mindsets.

Now, onto the recommendation: If you absolutely hate math and logic, in reality, maybe programming isn't your thing. That being said, if you find that you still want to learn some coding skills and you are more artistically inclined (as compared to engineering/logically/mathematically inclined) maybe you would do good to first learn HTML/CSS.

[rm -rf]

On 13/09/2016 at 4:21 AM, dave4shmups said:

Coding seems to be all the rage these days, and it is definitely something that interests me.  However, don't most, if not all, coding/programming languages require a mathematical mindset?  Because math was my weakest subject in school.  I talked to a friend who makes a living as a computer programmer who told me that you don't have to be good at math in order to get into computer programming.  But he also told me that he majored in math!  If you don't, then my question is-what is the easiest programming language to start out with?

Python is probably your best best, though C++ and Java are also good.

[dave4shmups]

I watched a video on YouTube about Unix for beginners-what programming language is used in Unix?  It seemed very intuitive to me.

[dave4shmups]

5 hours ago, dave4shmups said:

I watched a video on YouTube about Unix for beginners-what programming language is used in Unix?  It seemed very intuitive to me.

Never mind, it's just called UNIX; I thought it would be called something else for some reason.

[dave4shmups]

What programming language is used in Terminal on Macs?

[Guest]

Python is logical

 

lua is easy

 

C and C++ will help the most in the long run

 

HTML is fancy way of formatting text (might be able to do more)

 

C# is my favorite

 

Php is for backend (I think) 

 

scratch is for people that that lost their keyboard. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, dave4shmups said:

What programming language is used in Terminal on Macs?

It's called the terminal. It's not a language per say. 

 

Codecademy has a tutorial for Linux and Mac terminals 

then windows' has different commands. (You type in dir instead of ls to see what's in the folder you're in.) 

[Dat Guy]

5 hours ago, fpo said:

Python is logical

 

All programming languages are logical - even Entropy.

 

5 hours ago, fpo said:

HTML is fancy way of formatting text (might be able to do more)

 

So are RTF, PDF and Postscript. All of them have in common that, while they support interactivity up to a certain level, they are markup formats, not programming languages.

 

5 hours ago, fpo said:

Php is for backend (I think) 

 

That's because there is no browser with a built-in PHP interpreter. However, you could perfectly write client software in PHP.

[Dat Guy]

Actually, that's not entirely true. There are less verbose languages than C.