In this weekly roundup, we highlight what we believe to be the most thoughtful, helpful, and/or interesting discussion over the past week! Though we are strong believers in healthy and respectful debate, we typically try to choose discussions that are positive and avoid those that are overly contentious.
Any folks whose articles we feature here will be rewarded with our Discussion of the Week badge. ✨
Now that y'all understand the flow, let's go! 🏃💨
The Discussion of the Week
We got another one for y'all! This one comes courtesy of new member and first-time poster @priyabapodra who shared the fun icebreaker "Which is your first programming language?"
A classic discussion that's open to everybody! It's not every week that the post with the highest comment count takes the cake, but sure enough, Priya's post racked up more responses than any other in the past 7 days. That's a pretty impressive feat for someone who just joined our community. Goes to show you that despite not having a large following, you can still break through and reach folks here! 🙌
As with most discussions highlighted here, the real fun is in the comments. It's fun to hear how different folks got started, with people cutting their teeth on a wide variety of languages.
Voted right to the top of the list sits @jonrandy with Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum circa '83.
Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum... 1983
Classic!
Our very own @ben, got started with Java:
Java!
Ruby must've come into the picture later.
Albeit obscure, @jmfayard touts Ada as their first language:
Ada is the first language I learnt in my engineering school.
Ada is an obscure but good language.
Ada is also an obscure, alas, but incredible woman.
Ada Lovelace is a programmer from the XIX° century
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
And gives due props to Ada Lovelace.
CSS, BASIC, JS, C, and so on... the list winds on for a good long while with folks reminiscing about those languages they first reached for in their early days.
Do you remember what language you started with? Tell us about it in the comments of Priya's post here.
What are your picks?
The DEV Community is particularly special because of the kind, thoughtful, helpful, and entertaining discussions happening between community members. As such, we want to encourage folks to participate in discussions and reward those who are initiating or taking part in conversations across the community. After all, a community is made possible by the people interacting inside it.
There are loads of great discussions floating about in this community. This is just the one we chose to highlight. 🙂
I urge you all to share your favorite discussion of the past week below in the comments. And if you're up for it, give the author an @mention — it'll probably make 'em feel good. 💚
Top comments (18)
I liked the discussions about listicles in general, but one was already submitted for JavaScript post of the week.
Aww yeah! 😀
I know exactly the one you're talking about — @nombrekeff's Should listicles be forced to have a tag so we can hide them from feed?
Should listicles be forced to have a tag so we can hide them from feed?
Keff ・ Dec 9
This article is excellent. Very worthy shoutout! 🙌
Notably, the DEV Team has been chatting about this one along with The Conundrum of the "Top X" Articles 🤔... we're definitely listening out for any issues y'all raise + y'all's feedback and ideas about how we could go about solving these things. We're eager to keep improving in this regard and community feedback is so essential for us to know where to focus!
Wow, that was fast! I'm somewhat tempted to recommend my own post, but I won't. :D (The discussion isn't very good, in fact, there seems to be some rather rude remarks?? I reported them, but am not sure what you guys do with that.)
There's also a lot of (not all positive) discussion here:
dev.to/lissy93/50-ways-to-bring-in...
I'll be watching to see what gets picked. Thanks for responding, since you must be busy!
No probs! Happy to chat. 🙂
We try our best to handle rude comments fairly based upon our Code of Conduct. Mostly marking them as unconstructive and potentially warning or suspending the commenter. I can't speak to the specifics of your situation and would rather not in public, but if you're experiencing abuse, please do continue to report it to us — all of these reports are manually reviewed by our team! If for any reason you feel like we're not doing enough, then feel free to hit me up privately (michael@forem.com) and we can def chat through it.
Anywho, both posts you mention are quite cool! To be clear, we already picked the Discussion of the Week for this week above — the prompt I drop at the bottom is really just asking you all personally which articles you think were the best discussion in the past week and encouraging y'all to share them. It's not actually a voting mechanism, though that's a really cool idea!
Regardless, I'm happy you found multiple cool discussion posts from throughout the week and dropped them in here. You picked out some great ones! 🙌
OK, great! Thanks for your time!
Of course! 😀
Videoton VDX terminal basic around 1980, I just meet at international fair BMV, at Videoton stand run some terminal, and I try to run my first for loop which I was readed some Basic book. ... and this still run, after a couple try.
i started with c# in 2021, ended the course after 6 months in april 2022 and started a new position, where i can code in c# with may 2022 .. this year i started with unity gamedev, react and python .. after about 2-3 months of learning react i got involved in a project where nodejs and react is used ..
My first Programming language was "PYTHON". Beginner Friendly.
PHP and after a year I started hearing people all over the internet discouraging it just when I began to like. I stayed on
Mainframes Z o/s 390 ... JCL, Cobol and Rexx
BASIC, meanwhile there was Python already :(
FORTRAN 77
Thank you so much for appreciate me ! :)
Of course! Thank you for writing up such a fun discussion for us all, Priya. 🙌
🐍 Python here! Looks like its simple and popular, and still growing, so this looked like an obvious choice for me :)
My first language was C++ couldn't get beyond classes I was young so that could have been a factor.
That definitely makes sense.
Also — and saying this with my limited knowledge of programming (I'm not a dev!) — I've heard C++ is "closer to the metal" or there are fewer layers of abstraction so you have finer control over certain things which can be really powerful, but also requires more of you as a dev.
Am I right in thinking this? I am kinda regurgitating things I've heard folks say in the past, but I could certainly be off. 😅
I wanna say a lot of games are built on C++ too — at least the big ones. Not necessarily the indie games.