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Thinking of learning how to code, any good first languages or tips?
| Read. Do. Retry. In programming you'll need to start accepting that failures can happen from the smallest of mistake.
For your first language, I recommend dipping into OOP first. Java, C (and derivatives) — those languages can teach you the very basics of programming quickly.
If you prefer the less steep learning curve, Python is a good starting point as well.
| Do you want to eventually have an academic career or be a very smart programmer? Do you handle Mathematics well? If so, I'll deviate a bit from the usual suggestions and propose an alternate in my opinion more interesting route to approach programming. Look up the "MIT SICP Lecture" video series about the basic principles of computation. This will teach you important cornerstones of programming, which might even save you from becoming a code monkey. Scheme is a great language!
| >>310892
To elaborate on why I find this way worthwhile: A lot of self taught programmers, or ones in terrible education are not taught computer science basics. It in my experience results in what you call "code monkeys" who rely on copy-pasting code from the internet they don't really understand. They learn skills just to get things done, without really understanding what's going on in any other layer of abstraction they're currently working in.
| >>310893
What ever way you choose, it'll certainly not be a short affair. Professional programmers will likely have poured thousands of hours into programming before they even got their first job.
| >>7b9400 A few months ago when I finally decided to take coding seriously I downloaded the pdf of the book with the intent of doing all the exercises. Some of them are pretty hard but I try at least. I will check the videos to see if there is value in reading the book and watching them. However the exercises really helped me understand stuff so far. So if there's no form of exercises in the lectures I would still recommend going through them
| Also >(((((lisp)))))
| OP here, thanks for the replies! I'll try all the options and see which ones are fit for me.
| What are you going to use code for? Because it's good for automation, so you should try to learn how it's used to make your life more convenient.
| There's always Ruby, which is what Danger/u/ runs on. I think.
| is javascript a good language to start with?
| >>311135 I wouldn't recommend starting with it, for starters you already need to have some idea of HTML (and maybe CSS) and the syntax of it is a little confusing for complete beginners. As other people said, I would recommend starting with C, it's an older, simpler language and you can get the hang of programming with it, when you're more confident move to something more modern, like C#.
| >>311347 It really depends on what you want to work with, Java is a decent alternative to C#, especially if you plan on doing stuff for mobile.
| Learn to connect switches, relais and lightbulbs with wires to a logical circuit,
| In my opinion C is the best language to start with. Not too low level, yet it models hardware well and makes you understand what goes on under the rug. Not object oriented and function based, yet has its structures and unions to teach how data can be clumped in bundles and object oriented things are only a few member functions away. It doesn't cover reality with beautiful veils of abstractions but shows and does exactly and only what the code is.
| I actually do not know Lua, so I'd only be ridiculous if I tried to express an opinion about it.
| do different languages do different things or are they just different ways to do the same things?
| @.@
Man even just reading coding names makes me dizzy
| >>313253 Some languages are better suited to certain activities and software for that is easier to write in those languages. For example, awk is specialised to processing text, analysing it and acting on the content. C is more generic and provides means to do fork processes, do networking... You can write your own netstat and ping and traceroute with it. It processes text too. But while awk has some neat utilities in its core for this, with C it would be needed a bit more work.
| C doesnt know what a word is. Or the concept of a field delimter in a record. Or what a record is. It only knows characters. It can do what awk does, but while awk takes for granted some behaviour, one needs to 'teach' C that behaviour through coding.
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