bc-programming

I see this question semi-frequently on forums. It’s a reasonable question on the surface. However, the fact is that there is no “Best language for a beginner”. Truly, the very idea that a given computer language could be “better for beginners” than another is downright assinine.

Consider human languages. A person learns language over time, and there isn’t any more difficulty for different languages; the skill develops through practice. Chinese isn’t “harder” to learn than English, for example; but it is harder to learn when you know english.

So how does this extend into computer languages?

Well, the first computer language you learn won’t matter, just as the first Human language you learned doesn’t really matter.For Human languages, the big thing you are learning is how to express yourself to others. For Programming languages, the big thing you are learning is how to express yourself- to the computer.

Once you learn one imperative programming language, the others are easier to learn; same way with human languages. Once you know one germanic language, the others are typically easier to learn.

Of course, it’s harder to learn Chinese or Japanese when you are used to a latin alphabet; for programming languages, this “barrier” is typically found between imperative, Declarative, and functional languages. of course the actual difficulty is not quite at the same level; but functional languages are fundamentally different in many ways from imperative languages, enough that trying to take what you learned via programming in an imperative language and applying it to a functional one can do more harm than good to your learning process, just as trying to apply your understanding of English will harm attempts to learn most non-germanic languages, trying to apply an understanding of Chinese/Japanese/etc to learning English will harm attempts to learn it as well.

Additionally, one issue I find is that many people will say that “language X is easy to learn because it’s like plain english”. Which is a flawed perspective, since that brings with it a lot of language baggage; english is designed for communicating between people; a programming language is designed for communicating between a person and a computer (or rather, the interpreter/compiler which makes it into something the computer understands, but let’s not cloud the issue). So you end up with a psuedo-english language that tries to be declarative but at the same time isn’t english; SQL, for example, is english-like, but I’d be hard-pressed to say that “Select * from Customers Where CX>6″ is “plain english”. It’s easy to understand, but it’s restrictive; after all, in english the same concept could be expressed as “choose all fields from the customers table where the record in question has a CX field greater than 6″. But that is far from valid SQL, which has a far more restrictive grammar and syntax. (if it didn’t, parsing it would be a nightmare).

This is how I’ve always felt about it. What is important isn’t what specific language you learn but that you learn the concepts involved; for imperative languages this would be references, functions, recursion, variable allocations,object mutability, (and for OOP languages the various OOP concepts, such as polymorphism, aggregation, composition, delegation, etc). Functional languages, (and some imperative languages that integrate functional features) it’s things like lambdas, recursive definitions,Higher-order/First-class functions (Functions that take other functions as arguments), pure functions, strict versus non-strict evaluation, catamorphism, etc.

Once you learn the concepts, you can use pretty much learn any language with minimal effort, you just need to learn the syntax.(unless you are jumping across a declarative/imperative/functional divide, in which case you also need to learn and relearn other concepts as well). Overall, however, Learning a syntax is easy; the first programming language you learn is hardest no matter which one you choose simply because you have to learn the syntax at the same time you are learning all sorts of “new” concepts. It doesn’t matter what language you choose; it will always be “harder” to learn than later languages for you.