PureBasic as your first programming language!

[xorc1zt]

I'd never advice anyone to pick a closed source language as purebasic to start programming. Lisp or python are better choices since u can test your code directly in a shell without any compilation times.

[Tenaja]

I don't really agree with that... pb compiles SO FAST that it is irrelevant. Besides, with the debugger so helpful and easy to use, I would certainly wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for those reasons. Some of the "more capable" debuggers are so complicated they get very overwhelming for a newbie.

(Eclipse, for example, is HORRID. I was working with it today, and couldn't figure out how to get the Open Project and Close Project menu items enabled...even google, despite many identical requests and responses, was no help.)

[Shield]

I'd never recommend learning LISP as the first language. While LISP is a very interesting
and still useful language that provides many advantages, the programming concepts (functional)
and the style of programming (no statements at all) are way too different to "regular" languages.

In my opionion it's best to learn one of the "mainstream" or "mainstream-like" programming languages
to get to know the basic concepts of programming. Especially if the knowledge is supposed to be a foundation
for a career as a programmer.

[xorc1zt]

My first programming language was CLISP then Ada and C, i didn't get any problems to do the switch but i saw many programmers getting in troubles when doing the reverse path. We are not anymore in the 90's, functional programming is getting more and more attention since multi-core processors are now the standard. For example, many banks are switching from Ada to haskell or erlang and i can see scala taking over java in the future. Anyway java is a horrible language, imo the success of java is mostly from the built-in libs (awt, swing, ...) and a hard "lobbying" from Sun.

That why purebasic turned into a deception to me. Fantaisie software just updating/adding libraries but the language itself didn't get any evolution. some basics features like multi-line statement are still missing. The day the compiler will be open source, it's gonna be a great day.

[Krix]

Thank you guys all of your feedback! I'm convinced that PureBasic is one of the best place to start.

Happy New Year!

[Kwai chang caine]

I've never coded in C

Incredible
It's again a better miracle, when i see your level

For me first language TO7 Basic, after Basic 800XL, GFA Basic, QB45, Vb6, PB

[Shield]

C++ was effectively derived from C and indeed in the event you wish you can include C code within your C++ source and it will be accepted by most compilers.

It will be accepted by all compilers that support the C++ standard properly, if I'm not completely mistaken here.

[the.weavster]

I'd recommend JavaScript, not because it's my favourite but because of what it offers.

JavaScript is a high level (no pointing, peeking, poking, allocating and freeing buffers to worry about) and it offers a very large playground: Chrome extensions, FireFox extensions, mobile phone apps, web sites, Plasmoids on KDE, Seed on Gnome and even Windows 8 will be programmable with JavaScript. Then of course you've got the haXe compiler that compiles JavaScript into apps for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Flash.

The syntax also has a passing resemblance to C++ which may help if you get a bit pervy and want to torture yourself with a low level language.

I think Chrome extensions are probably a good place to start, there's a lot of functionality to tap into and a built in debugger too, on top of that it's all free. Google even offer an app store for Chrome extensions should you come up with something ultra-cool.

As another Brucey bonus Google is currently working on porting Chrome to Android.

Finding a free IDE with syntax highlighting for JavaScript is dead easy too no matter what OS you're using.