willing to try it out

i did a bit of programming back in HS and i wanted to get back into it again i found getting the computer to do something was a bit tough and i liked the challenge. i was wondering what programming language should i pick up? + for someone that posts reference material along with it

thank you anon

If you're intimately familiar with one language a lot of other languages in the same family are utterly trivial and it doesn't really matter which one you learn first. When you first learn Java, C#, C++, there really isn't much relearning language-wise you have to do when you tackle the others. It's pretty much personal preference. The point is that you're learning the very concept of functions, argument passing, return values, modules, if-then-else, loops, classes, objects, that sort of thing. Scheme, Haskell, ML, OCaml, K, the functional languages are in their own fucked up tiny inbred academic niche in terms of concepts that does not apply at all to the rest of the world. An abject beginner somehow managing to grasp Haskell as his first language would be ill-equipped to deal with the rest of the programming world. It's like raising your kid to speak Esperanto or Klingon. Way to fuck him up, you monster.