I am a total n00b when it comes to programming. Google wasn't very helpful and many of you seem to be experienced. Anyone have any suggestions on languages/programs to start with?
Well, I suppose I'll bring down the fury of the coding gods down upon me by suggesting this, but I'm happy to have started with plain old QuickBasic :smt043 Here's why: -it's free (more or less, Qbasic came with DOS and nowadays you can download QuickBasic 4.5 and 7.1 all over the 'Net but I dont know what M$ thinks of that) -its stultifyingly simple, its got a load of graphics functions built-in (so its great to toy around with), isnt event-based like VB, doesnt require knowledge of pointers and can run programs from the dev environment without having to use a shell to compile. -there's loads of sources on the 'web. Granted, most of them are written by 15-year-olds; but boy, I still dream of the day when I found out about the whole online QB community, I felt like a 6 year old in a toy store with everything going free :smt024 -it provides a basic (no pun intended) introduction to general programming principles like variables and functions. -it runs on DOS :smt033 The best thing is, there's plenty of books on the language, most of them written with absolute programming n00bs in mind. Pick up a few books, code away during the summer and afterwards you can look into moving to a more professional language. Good luck!
I put my vote in for a scripting langauge... Perl being my favorite. You learn some goodies about the basics of programming (containers, loops, etc.) but don't have to do deal w/ data types, pointers, or classes (some snags when learning C++) and if you use Linux, it's very PRACTICAL -- it can help you automate tasks on your PC. I'm learning C++/Qt now, and I kinda suck at it, but gettin better.
