I previously voted JavaScript, but now I have changed my vote, because my first programming language was actually HTML. Unfortunately, when I started re-learning HTML as I began to build my own website, I would see places like Stack Overflow having people calling HTML not a programming language, so I didn’t dare call HTML a programming language, but my mind changed after reading and watching Heydon Pickering’s piece on Webbed Briefs “Is HTML A Programming Language?” HTML is a programming language, and I’m not going to let anyone tell me otherwise.
Anyway, HTML became my first programming language when I learned it during my teenage blogging days in the 2000s to customise my blogs.
There are too many pedants on Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange) who think entirely too highly of their own intellects. That’s the most charitable way to put it that I can think of after midnight.
My first language was Liberty Basic, because of the book Beginning Programming for Dummies - and then I immediately went into C from there, because I wanted to make video games, and in the 2000s C and Allegro 4 was a pretty reasonable way to do that. I don’t remember actually making anything interesting in Liberty Basic, though I did play with modifying the example programs it came with, and I remember I wanted to try and make a fake OS with it. I mostly use Python now, unless I’m making something for an embedded system in which case it’s going to be C++ or assembly.
Hypertext Markup Language. I have never thought that it wouldn’t be considered one, or that others deemed it not so… I guess it’s in the name, but to me, I consider it a programming language just as any other.
I think if I remember correctly my first language was Swift in a programming class I took in high school, I think that semester was specifically focused on app development, which I honestly forgot everything about and don’t even use anymore hahaha.
The first programming language I actually became proficient in is HTML technically.
Then I went through (university-mandated) Pascal and C++, then I focussed for 20 years on Java. During the pandemic I started playing with Python, and that’s my current language of choice.
My very first programming language that I actually understand with any kind of certainty is dreammaker, a pretty old game engine made for days gone by. The only reason I learned it was to contribute to a FOSS game i’m a huge fan of, a really annoying niche bug was hampering my gameplay and I spent the night punching my head on the wall 'till I fixed it. (and even then I needed help lol)