What language should beginning programmers choose?
Now that Stack Overflow has a space for subjective content—Discussions—we want to occasionally highlight the great conversations happening on site. Personally, I love hearing about different people’s perspectives on software and technology issues. With the answers to so many technology questions tending towards “it depends” as one gains experience, more perspectives reveal additional factors that “it” could depend on.
For today’s “it” question, I want to highlight the discussion happening in “What language would be the best beginner language?” User Mr Quibbles, relatively new to programming, asks:
I started learning programming about a year and a half ago and I started with Python 3.10 as my first ever language. I was advised to do so by friends of mine due to its English-like syntax, however, about a month ago I heard friends of mine discussing that C might be a better language to start.
I have been learning C++ for the past 3 months in my free time and I can see their point, C++ syntax has a lot more in common with other programming languages than Python does. So I wanna hear what others here think, which language do you think would be best to start with, and which language did you learn first?
