Once you’ve decided to learn a programming language, the next question is almost always “Which One?”. Google returns 4,770 results for this question so there are definitely a lot of opinions on the topic. Reading the programming and technology forums will show a lot of very passionate and opinionated people regarding their language of choice. You can spend hours on this topic and not really get any closer to determining the right choice. Let me make it simple for you by providing a basic framework for deciding.
- What are you interested in creating? Do you want to create mobile apps, apps for windows, apps for mac, apps for linux, or website type applications?
- What resources do you have available to you? Is cost an issue? Do you already have something that makes on language easier to start with (Like a webserver running a php website)?
- Do you have any friends or contacts with experience in a language that are willing and able to answer questions if you have them?
- Can you find lots of tutorials and sample code in the language?
- Is there a place online where people actively post and answer questions?
- Is there a language that sounds exciting to try?
- Is there a need for certain language skills where you work?
- Is there a predominant language used at work?
The most important question is obviously, what do you want to do. It makes no sense to learn visual basic if you want to develop iPhone applications. But if you want to create web applications, there are a number of choices available to you ranging from basic html, html5, javascript, php, ruby, java, to python and many things in between.
Take 20 minutes and answer the 8 questions above based on a few google searches. See if one or two languages stand out for you. From there, pick which ever one sounds the most interesting. You really will not go wrong picking between one language or another.
If by chance you are still struggling I recommend starting with the basics. For webapps, start learning basic html and javascript, much of the web is based on these languages and the lend themselves well to other programming languages. For desktop applications, learn an easy to read and write language like python or visual basic. The quicker you can start writing something that works, the quicker you will reap the returns.
Personally I’ve worked with HTML, C, C#, Visual Basic, VB Script, JavaScript, PHP, Python, SQL, Java, Assembly, Lex/Yacc, TCL/TK, AutoIT, and XML. Each language has it’s strength and weaknesses depending on what you want to do but I’ve always been partial to Python. It is easy to write and test code in Python, but be warned, it can be hard to deploy the code for others to use.
