this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Lemme tell you something, DO NOT learn BASIC as your first language. As a hobbyist, I avoided C/C++ for 25 years because I just didn't get pointers and memory manipulation, and messed around with other languages like JS and PHP instead (also BASIC's GOTO and GOSUB kinda ruined me as a programmer for a few years). But once it finally clicked a couple years ago, I now want to write EVERYTHING in C/C++.
I think plain C at least should be everybody's first language. It literally reprograms your brain to think exactly like how a computer internally functions. I never got that with other languages, because they were so far removed from the actual machine.
Edit: also, after learning some of it, it's pretty neat when you do stuff like look at parts of the Linux kernel source code and think "wow, I know what's actually happening here now!".
I actually think that everybody should learn a functional language like Scheme first because it teaches you to think about state explicitly. It's very easy for somebody who learned a functional language to pick up an imperative one, but it's very hard for people to go the other way around.