PSA for beginner programmers:

whatever your first language is, it will probably suck and you should learn more languages and more paradigms

this message brought to you by the existence of NodeJS

@grainloom
@Shamar
yeah, when you know more languages, you'll be able to better pick right tool for the job.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl @grainloom

Yes, everyone has to learn different languages.

However, starting with C means that you know how everything works directly with memory. You learn to implement very complex functionality (with ugly syntax, such as pointers to functions and whatnot) but you know how it works on a low level.

Then you go to other languages, and you learn algorithms, and design algorithms and think in several languages. That's the goal.

@rice
Starting with C means you learn the C runtime - typically the unix interface to the C runtime. It's a not quite right to think that C is how computers work.
@Shamar @Wolf480pl @grainloom

@mikeburns @Shamar @Wolf480pl @grainloom This is true! It just helps to understand the underlying processes better. Eventually when you learn lots of other languages on top, you just have a better understanding how to make things simpler, because you know the underlying processes, too.

@rice @mikeburns @Shamar @grainloom
Yeah, what's important here is that most of other languages are actually implemented on top of C runtime.

@Shamar @mikeburns @Wolf480pl @grainloom I think Python -> C (all concepts) in combination with Assembly -> other languages (Rust, functional langs, etc) makes sense if you want to learn fundamental in-depth.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl @mikeburns @rice Lua for first language? Or Ruby?

@Shamar @Wolf480pl @mikeburns @rice

It definitely has one for WxWidgets and probably for others (I haven't really looked) but there is also Love2D instead of GUI programming, which might be even more fun.

@grainloom @rice @mikeburns @Shamar
oh, and there's conky, which can be scripted with lua and has cairo bindings, so you can draw fancy CPU graphs and whatnot. Tho, for a beginner, Love2D or WxWidgets will probably be more fun I guess...