given our collective enthusiasm for building websites, my guess is that javascipt will be the most popular answer, but who knows what the data will show!
in addition to the poll, i’m really interested in hearing about everyone’s first programming experiences.
why did you choose the programming language you started with?
what did you make with it?
do you still use it a lot, or do you prefer other languages now?
my first language was R! i’m a researcher, so statistics and graphs are a huge part of what i do. a stats class i took about three years ago taught me the basics of R, which i used to write a script for analyzing qPCR data. i haven’t written anything since, but i still use that script once or twice a week!
no but seriously i have had a hard time grokking how programming works on my own in the past, but in the past few years i am slowly getting accustomed to it. if anyone knows of any good free online classes or guided tutorials for python or PHP let me know because i am tempted to learn those!
(also hot take: I think I don’t like how JavaScript works, lol. the syntax is just all over the place and dumb imo :P )
I dabbled in a ton of different languages as a kid, but I never really “got” programming until later on, so I’m not officially counting them. I did a little goofing around in VBScript on Windows, some JS and PHP to make simple modifications to forum templates. I had a class in middle school that taught some ActionScript but I was mostly just copying from the tutorial videos. In high school, I had a programming class that started with QBASIC and Scratch, eventually moving onto Java. I voted Java since I think that’s when it truly started to “click” with me.
Not at all a hot take if you started out with other languages. So much of JS works completely different from how other languages work.
I was taught some very basic VisualBasic6 as a kid, but I never really grokked it. I only really got the hang of the basics with the drag-and-drop stuff of RPG Maker, and later on some bash.
My first proper language experience was Java in college.
My very first language I learned was Pyhton because I wanted to make bots for a server I was making with my friend but overtime it became a little tedious because of all the modules I had to import. I thin began learning HTML-CSS and had a lot more fun there. Python taught me a few good things about the basics of coding. I learned about functions and async functions too. It’s helped me learn other languages a little better.
Mine was BASIC, but more specifically it was TI-BASIC on a Texas Instruments Keyboard computer my dad brought home when I was little. I loved that stupid thing so much.
I learned just a little of Javascript when I was eleven. No idea why I chose it. Didn’t make much at first. Then I did more in Scratch, which seems an unconventional order but they’ve the same fundamental concepts (and modern Scratch is implemented in JavaScript anyways :p )
Working in Scratch seems to me in some way similar to how working with early home computers must’ve felt; you have a limited & fixed screen size, limited program size, and data constraints (mostly only on its “cloud variables” feature, which gives you 10 variables of server-side storage, each of which can only contain decimal digits. Nevertheless, people, including myself, have implemented basic online-multiplayer capabilities with this :) )
Nowadays I do use Javascript a lot, and not Scratch. JS is useful for websites, after all :p
My first attempt at learning programming happened because I wanted to make a Minecraft mod. This was back when ModLoader was the norm and you had to run commands on a terminal to run MCP so the Minecraft JAR could be decompiled. I was able to navigate my way through downloading MCP and decompiling Minecraft, and recompiling back to a JAR, but once I had NetBeans opened to do some coding, I could not make any sense of what Java was or how it worked, so I’d just try mindlessly copying and pasting Java code to no success.
My first successful attempt at programming was with Scratch. My first more “mature” programming language was Python. Then HTML, CSS, and JS after that. After a year or two I came back to Java and it made significantly more sense.
Since then I’ve touched a bunch of different programming languages. But I still continue to use Python on occasion.
My first experience with programming a computer was in 6th grade. We had some older computers in the corner of the classroom, one of them being an Apple IIGS. I slid a demo disc in regarding the use of Apple Basic and learned enough to make a program that asked for your name and said “Hello, $NAME”. Obviously this was quite cool to 6th grade me, but what was cooler was showing it off to other students. I would later learn the idea of abstraction and reflect on this moment. Me, the programmer knew how this program worked, the students only knew the computer was saying hello to them. Both are magic, but in their own unique ways based on the experience and background of someone.
Ah, I too used Minecraft in my early stages of programming, but not modding — I worked with its “command blocks”, which I believe are largely obsolete now, superseded by “data packs”.
The first one I actually wrote something useful in was JavaScript, and that happened back in 2015 when I made a toy MSHTA “web browser”.
The first one I meaningfully tried to teach myself in order to understand programming concepts was Pascal. I think it happened in 2013 or something. I used a Russian-language book called, I think, “Songs about Pascal” to guide myself. To be fair, I didn’t learn that much.
The first one I’ve ever touched at all was PHP which I used to make my shitty website as an 8 year old back in 2010 or so. I wouldn’t call that programing, though, because I basically copy and pasted other people’s code.
wow, everyone has such different answers; my guess was totally wrong!
i’m still a total novice. my first language is the only one i know (and i barely know it!), so it’s encouraging hearing how many of you tried out different languages and projects before you started to “get” programming. i think that’s what i’ll try next.
I love reading the reasons behind people’s first programming language It’s so cool that a bunch of us just wanted to create/make something and went out of their way to learn it!
I learned html and css because I wanted to make a website for my neopets when I was a kid ^^ I know those are not programing languages by the way! My first real language was Java because they taught it on school, I was not very good at self-learning back then so I had to go to formal education before I knew how to explore new technologies by myself
I initially chose Python, because I took a class in undergrad (Python Programming for Biologists). But I forgot that a few years before that I dabbled in JavaScript at work when doing some scripting in Adobe Captivate (eLearning Software).
It was a weird program; it had a rudimentary way to build scripts within a menu, but in order to do some slightly more complex things you had to switch to JavaScript. Both of which then got translated to ActionScript for the Flash output.
Me too! I have vague memories of going through a “for dummies” book and building a very basic media player. Then I got very upset and started crying because my mother didn’t really understand computers much and didn’t understand that I was proud of it. I was apparently old enough to code but not enough to regulate my emotions, lol!
Later on I learned HTML and JS via Neopets and pet pages. It led to a career, so I can’t say I regret it!
This was my experience too. I have to give my mom credit though because she was always fine with me getting one of the many Linux magazines or a book on programming from the book store whenever we would go to look at books.
Yeah fortunately my parents were pretty supportive too, they just didn’t understand anything about what I was doing. I would show them and get something like “cool, but why” and it was a little deflating.
My mom was definitely in the supportive but didn’t understand camp as well. Which was tough because I definitely looked up to her a lot. Growing up no one around me really knew anything about computers so there was no outlet to show things to people. This would actually lead to me learning how to say certain tech terms the wrong way because I had only seen them in written form. I mispronounced Debian for a long time and pronounced it as Deb-Eye-an
It’s so cool that a bunch of us just wanted to create/make something and went out of their way to learn it!