Does it really matter?

I want to start learning how to program (just as a hobby... not for video games, not for a job), and people will always argue about what's the best programming language, or what's the best beginner language. But as long as I follow through with the learning, does it really even matter? So what if I don't pick the perfect choice for a first language? I can always learn others, right? Why do people argue so much about language superiority? As long as the end results are satisfactory, does it really matter how you got there?

>>6

There's nothing wrong with JS, Ruby or Python. PHP is another matter. That language is pretty much broken, yet still very popular, but I wouldn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. :)

I wouldn't bother with C or C++ to begin with. Too low level, unless you're interested in doing hardware interfacing, and even for that there are high level libraries available for most high level languages.

I see Haskell pop up in here a lot too, which is surprising. Haskell, Lisp (old stuff btw), Erlang, F#, Scala etc are all FUNCTIONAL languages.

This is a completely different paradigm from languages like Java, C#, C, C++, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Pascal etc, which are OBJECT ORIENTED programming languages.

To start with I would definitely pick an OOP language over a functional one.

Learning a functional one as a second (or third) language would be a good choice however, as it tackles problems from a different side which teach you techniques you can also use in your trusty OOP language as well.

I would also go for something practical, meaning, a language you can actually write a full application with.
Functional languages usually don't allow this, unless you only want to write console applications.
If you want to write something with an actual form based UI or a web frontend, you're going to need something OOPish.


Something like Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Python + Django or C# are a good fit for this IMO.