It depends WHY you want to learn languages. It’s good to have a clear and practical goal. And even better to have a programmer friend, whom you can bug on every step and question
For example, I’m a great fan of interactive fiction (text adventures) and they made me learn a little LUA, which is a great, flexible and powerful language. And it’s noob-friendly, if you had some BASIC experience. Python is also very good for beginners, and it’s powerful too.
If you want to dig deeper than just extreme programming, serious programmers recommend to start with a metalanguage, like Scheme, or C#. They also do not recommend to start with C++ or Java, because those inherit lots of cumbersome unnecessary things, which are done way easier in other languages.
Generally speaking, you need to choose programming language according to the task you want to perform.
vadarfone
Man, succeeding to make ‘hello world’ in 3 hours doesn’t quite prove neither that C++ is a good language to start with, nor that you’ll still love it when you get to more complex things. C++ is very, very cumbersome and unaesthetic. Also very illogical at times, like for instance, with defining variables. Try LUA or Python and then compare how long it takes to learn.
Id go for c++.
Order the book that this guy wrote: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/
He kind of kow what he’s talking about.
Learning to program in c++ for windows can be a little more confusing, but youll get it. I used to make kids games backl in the day, and it only took about 3 billion years to go from standard c++ to understand how to write for windows, but when i got it it was easy and fun. You basicly can do whatever you want, and c++ is so flexible and non-rigid that you end up developing your own style.
Hey, i did the same thing in university. And we also learnt c++ on top of html, dthml, javascript, java, css, sql i cant even remember it all. When i was trough i ended up using c++ most of the time, and of course html and some php (iphp is a lot of fun, its great to program directly to the website.) I did a few java applets for websites also. I got the second best degree in c++, but i almost flunked java, hehe. It was a lot about “swing” or whatever it’s called, i didnt like it and found it ugly and way to stale.
The thing is, when you understand one language, you really understands them all in a way. Then it is just a matter of learning the syntax for each one, but in our days, you dont even know that fully, because you just look ut up online as you need it. PHP is that way, you just learn the basics in an hour or so, and your good to do whatever, you just look up stuff as you make your code.
I couldn’t find the words then, but the idea has been around for some time, mindmapping that is.
I’m currently using FreeMind which is great and quite flexible. I put off mindmapping then, thinking it was some kind of hooplah but it was easy to recollect while I was looking for a way to handle information overload. Also thanks to danoise for mentioning it on Renoise: The Mindmap. FeeMind is wriiten in Java.
I’m looking at the other mindmapping software to see the differences but so far nothing in what I had in mind. What I had in mind was more diagrammatic and 3 dimensional.
oh yeah processing is fun! java is realy friendly in general. get netbeans, try JOGL/LWJGL for opengl stuff … lwjgl ships with OpenAL … and this might be funny too : http://jvstwrapper.sourceforge.net/
i dont think vb is too bad for starters. you can learn some basics… but for music stuff its useless…
but if you r interested in making calculators or an alarm clock^^ its perfect for you
i know its not a language, but MAX/MSP is a beast.
I would certainly suggest Python. It is probably the most easiest language to learn, due to its great readability, but yet one of the most powerful ones. It’s a high-level language, which makes sense to use for most things these days. If you at some point run into a problem where a scripting language is too fast, you can always rewrite this part in C and use C-types to wrap it into Python. But since you are just starting out, this wont happen any time soon.
Also, the fact that Python is very loosely types is actually an advantage when starting with programming. You can thus focus on the content of what you want to learn, on the programming concepts themselves, instead of having to deal with some syntactic overhead. Once you understand the concepts you can move on to more strict languages.
As others have mentioned it really depends on why you want to learn to program.
I’m partial to Ruby, and the Java implementation of it, JRuby. With the latter you can use Java libraries (if you want).
However, if you are mainly curious about programming in general but want some practical benefits try learning Lua.
Lua scripting it built into Renoise so you can write your own tools, GUI add-ons, OSC handlers, and so on. It’s a clean nicely thought-out language.
You can also use it to write Web apps, build mobile applications, write games, etc.
I’d suggest avoiding PHP, Java, VB; while they have their uses they also have (to varying degrees) some crufty, noisy syntax and awkward design artifacts.
Keep in mind that different languages tend to be centered on different programming paradigms. PHP is strongly procedural with some half-assed object-oriented stuff bolted on.
Ruby is strongly object-oriented. Java is also an OO language but takes a different approach to OO than Ruby (making Java too clunky for my tastes).
+1 for Lua
It’s my first language and I learnt it so that I could make renoise tools. I can’t comment on other languages as I don’t know them but lua has been really easy to learn. I have also started playing around with LuaAV and Corona SDK which lets you make mobile apps on iOS and Android. All good things!
Fuck, this thread is 5 years old. A lot has changed since 2008. For one, ActionScript is more or less dead thanks to Apple forbidding it on their phones.
My current recommendation is Lua.
I still do PHP. I’m not doing Perl anymore. As I run Linux now I’m not interested in OBJ-C so much anymore. When someone who does Python or Ruby tells you PHP sucks, smile and nod politely, then use Lua.
Anyone who is not recommending Lua (and the Lua API) in the Renoise forums (which wasn’t available back then) is simply posturing a language they already use and the biases that come with their turf. Lua is probably the best way to learn programming for anyone reading this since it combines programming with Renoise; which is why you are reading this in the first place?
That’s another thing I’m unaware of. General programming culture, history and time-line to the future. I guess that’s why I see terms like “sustainable” attached to some languages today. Aside from slicing some time to devote to learning, not knowing the culture has me still looking from the outside. Codeschool so far is good. I got through the R language test drive in one sitting, plus being able to test drive other languages non-linearly gives me a better idea on how to progress. Before R, I didn’t even know what “numbers”, “strings”, “boolean values”, “variables”, and “functions” were.
Yeah, I’ll probably start digging some sort of foundation… it is Renoise related after all. And fiddle around with R, and see if I can apply statistics culture with music.
