I have been thinking of learning some programming recently, but I don’t feel confident enough. Is there any point in beginning with something like Zig or Go, and switching to something more serious later?
I have been thinking of learning some programming recently, but I don’t feel confident enough. Is there any point in beginning with something like Zig or Go, and switching to something more serious later?
so one thing about programming languages is at the end of the day, they can all generally accomplish the same things. they are all turing complete and generally capable of expressing programs that any of the others can.
as others in this thread have said, many patterns you learn within one programming language will transfer to others. some personal context, i attended and then taught at a coding bootcamp for a year about a decade ago, saw over 300 students and have been doing software engineering since. it was full time and the students would learn ruby basics over 4 weeks and then would be able to do the same things in javascript in a few days. that said, those languages are pretty similar but i hope it makes the point.
so my main suggestion is to start with a general purpose, syntactically simple language. the less syntax and overhead in the language, the more you will be able to focus on the fundamentals of programming and less on jumping through the hoops of the language you’re working with. stay away from typed languages for at least the first few months unless you really really only want to do low level stuff.
some languages i think you should consider: ruby, python, javascript. they are relatively similar for a beginner. python has more usage in data heavy scenarios due to it’s extensive data libraries. ruby’s whole mantra is being a joy to write. javascript is simple but that also means you don’t get much help from it out of the box. consider it as a first/second language mainly if you are interested in websites.