Hi Everyone !👋
"programming for beginners" seems like a really hot-topic , no matter what year it is. Each year thousands of people get attracted to this world irrespective of age or background.
So I would like to ask all the devs in this community ,
What was the first language you studied and how was your experience?
please feel free to pour your ❤️ out in the comments section. I would love to know how you guys made it !🥳
Top comments (49)
My first language is "HTML" which is not a programming language.
same here lol, I first leaned HTML at school
my school used to teach us this thing called "Q-BASIC".
Today , i dont even remember one line of it , all i remember is grinding on the keyboard for hours when i was in 5th Grade 😂
:)
haha yes ! but it a really great language to get started in tech !
yes really
MS DOS. Not even kidding, and no I'm not that old. I just happen to find the
cmdexecutable in the start menu and started messing around with.batfiles.I thought I was some pro-haxor only a few steps away from hacking world governments when I figured out how to change the color of the
cmdwindow, and make "fake" blue screens of death.It was an interesting experience, since I didn't use the internet, I basically guessed my way through learning some basics of coding, and spent large portions of my time reading the help pages.
It wasn't until 5+ years later when I got into college I started to get serious and learned a "real" programming (Java and Python). It was only then I realized how little I actually knew with my
cmdscripts. However, I think the time spent learning, and debugging my small fun little scripts really taught me a number of skills I later applied to hit the ground running with full on programming.IKR!!!
This is probably the most interesting reply and exactly what i was looking for to start my day off with ! i guess we all have been " Hackers" in our own mind when we started programming 😂
N64 GameShark codes.
Had to learn what hexadecimal was. And binary.
Then what addresses meant when looking at ram.
Then logic gates.
My entire career of web engineering eventually grew from there.
10/10 would recommend
WOW this sounds amazing.
in my 2nd year of uni , i took a course dealing with logic gates and stuff and though i am really bad at circuits , this was a fun one !
please do tell me your journey into web dev!
Sure!
I needed a place to show off the hacks I was creating, my friend from school, Amber, showed me she had a website. Blew my mind. "Tell me everything." So I signed up for geocities that night. hahaha
In mid GameCube hacking era, I had friends from the hacking communities offer to host websites for me. Queue learning PHP & MySQL.
Then I added an admin page and learned AJAX so I could update my site without a bunch of manual work.
My friend and one of the "main characters" in the game hacking scene taught me regular expressions and my passion for parsing and transpiling code was born there.
One of the problems with game hacking communities at the time was that hackers couldn't share their work onto the main hub sites - you'd post in forums and wait for admins to see it and they added them. (then you have to ask for it to be updated when you make changes, etc - a gated hassle for everyone)
When Wii era hacking very first began, I went heads down for one week and created a multi-admin database for Wii codes. Hosting got passed around a lot over the years but I never paid for it. Authors had access to every game but could only contribute their own work and were only able to edit and remove any/all of their own work, whenever they wanted.
It grew into the world's largest Wii hacking database and had many years of success. It was fun! (I took it offline 2 years ago though. The contributions all moved to today's largest all-platforms game RAM hacking hub where hackers can manage their own contributions)
And of course, all the web stuff happened in parallel to other branches; I learned PowerPC ASM with a close hacker friend (who hosted my first non-geocities site for many many years) and started doing more complex assembly hacks.
I learned Java and created a few hacking utilities - one of them let you upload and compare ram dumps to help you find stable pointers in memory. (Pointers are addresses stored in ram as a value that updates and map to moving memory with a fixed offset. Like when an object loads, it doesn't always hit the same spot in ram, but a pointer showing where it loads will exist somewhere) Super useful because that kind of work wasn't easy to do without it.
Then in college I wrote an app in C that ran directly on the Wii from the Homebrew Channel that interfaced with my database online. That made almost everything more convenient for the audiences to use everyone's work. I loved that app! So fun.
...Yep! That's the start anyway! :)
Thank you for asking about this stuff, it was fun taking a trip down memory lane! 💜
I started with Pascal in borland Delphi in Highschool.
It was good because I didn't have any programming language to compare to, delphi had an drag and drop toolbox of components and I was doing a facebook like app. The fun fact was that I ended up in web development. Thi was fate.
Sounds like you were destined for WebDev !
Alot of low-code tools today are taking over in the drag and drop UI space. they are better than prototype tools because you can actually see your app come to life with functionalities. so whenever i am designing , i go low-code. and sometimes i just go all the way with backend integrations as well for smoother deployment and client delivery
What low-code apps/webapps do you like for designing your functionalities?
I usually make a lot of internal tools for companies and startups. so many times i am using a single database but data is being fetched to 5-6 places. so i use DronaHQ for this . its really quick.
JAVA, I opted for subject called "Informatics Practices" during my high school. So started my programming career with making GUI apps in netbeans. Also java seems a good start as it really introduces a beginner with concepts of classes and objects just from the start. Second was SQL which helped me quite a lot at later stages since I learnt it beforehand.
i get a feeling youre from an indian school like me haha!
my school offered python and java . and then they also taught SQL.
Yes definitely JAVA helps you dive deep into CS fundamentals and really understand how the computer works !
My software Engineer Journey began last year September and my first programming language was JavaScript! I was not fond of the language at first but the more i learned the better i got and the more in love i fell with it. Honestly , the number one reason i think people quit is because they don’t like the growing pains. After JavaScript i will definitely start studying Python.
Those who push out of the "growing pains" stage are the ones who really make it !
infact both the languages you are working on are the future of tech and dev ! so welcome to the community and all the best !
(Object) Pascal. It was fun. But really, any language is a good first language if you have a good teacher.
Personally, I think Lua would be a very good first language, or something similar like wren.
I learnt Lua when my students wanted to make roblox games ! it is quite similar to C++ and Java to be honest !
so many people have learnt pascal as their first language in this comments section and now i feel like trying it 😂
Logo. Not too many know about this but it was fun for me. We were in 2nd/3rd grade. Logo is an educational programming language. We used to make all kinds of shapes minimising the travel path of the turtle(cursor). In hindsight, I feel it was a good introduction for a kid that age. Computers were rare back then in my country(India) and not every household had it.
OH MY YES LOGOOOO!
how can i ever forget that turtle running around the screen while i cannot figure out how to make a star 😂😂😂.
indeed it was a very good introduction as to " How a Computer Reads Code".
yes my family got their first computer when I started learning Computers in primary school.
The first language I learned was python and the whole time I was just learning how to do things. Second language was JavaScript and I learned a bit more about what I was doing and how to lookup information to accomplish it. My third language was Java and that's when I finally started to understand what I was doing and how to do it.
Learn Java first, there's enough abstraction that it's not grindy but also the YouTube tutorials tend to be much more robust. Additionally, the language itself almost forces you to learn to code well.
i agree! my first language was also python but when i shifted to C++ i realised how abstract python was and how detailed C++ is. it really helped me understand CS fundamentals a lot better.
I started whit Python, then dropped,
then Python again, then dropped,
then finished a Python course in Udemy, and now I'm in React :P
A very on-again-off-again relationship i see 😂😂
how are you learning react ?
yeah lost my love to learning tnx to school T.T, I'm learning react whit a course in Scrimba! I'm also thinking about starting another one in YT
Schools tend to do the opposite of what they are supposed to do :( but i am happy to see you are back ! how's the Scrimba course ? could you review it for me ?
Order I learned:
Javascript -> Python -> SQL -> Java -> PHP -> C#
couldn't agree more! specially looking at the developer market today , javascript has to be the most marketable skill today!
HTML which is not a programming language.
But it counts !
So many people get into tech with HTML only .
this is our gateway drug 😂😂
Perl, was writing scripts for IRC in early 2000s. Then picked up Visual Basic.
wow ! please tell me more about your transition from perl to Visual Basic
C
How did you get started !
First learnt C, but wish I learnt Typescript earlier lol
Typescript has a beautiful fanbase amongst all the Javascript fanatics 😂😂😂😂.
my college taught C but wasnt a fan . i liked C++ more for their usecases