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?
Oldest 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".
I didn't choose, VBA chose me...my first experience with programming was writing Excel macros...it has been downhill from there! 🤣💗
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 Started "playing" with coding at 6/7 thanks to a relative who was a programmer, using Turbo Pascal.
Then I moved at 11 years old to python since I fell in love seeing my first programming book in a bookshop (python 2.5) and after that Lua .
14 years old C/C++ thanks to school and now I'm using mainly JS/TS .
As obvious, I also had to study (and use for working purposes) php and Java but I'm not so much into these two languages so I tend to forget about those experiences 😁
Wow. My story is kind of similar. I started with Python when I was 10 after going down a rabbit hole of HTML tutorials (for school) and from the same site, I learnt JS and Java basics. Later I started general learning (not from a a fixed resource) and created some basic things using Django. I have been in love with programming ever since.
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.
Actually, I started with basic & assembly programming (8085,8086) during my college days.... because only at that time I was introduced to computers and games. Then all those console games draw me to learn C programming...Even if you are working on modern technologies, please go back and learn these languages.... then we can understand the minds and creations of tech geniuses before decades
ZX Spectrum BASIC - because it was just there - as soon as you turned the machine on
This was 1983 - I was 7 years old
Also me
Vic20 memories
Perl, it was the late 90's and I needed something to distill large text files with regular expressions.
I personally started with Python. I enjoyed creating simple terminal programs and experimenting with different modules and libraries.
During my apprenticeship as an electronics engineer, we learned C in school. At first, we learned how software works, and what functions exist. However, we eventually transitioned to embedded C, which required a deeper understanding.
While I may not have chosen to learn C initially, I found the experience to be invaluable. It taught me how computers work at a fundamental level, as well as the basics of programming, which have proven useful.
Regards
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.