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It is often an intriguing experience for a new programmer to decide on which language to start first. I myself have gone through the painstaking research to come up with a better answer to this question. Nonetheless, while there may not be just one answer to this question, I will reflect my own journey regarding how it all began.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I support others' view when they say that the choice of the first programming language to learn should depend on the individual goals and interests. Absolutely logical! However, as a beginner, it is often possible that you slow or stop your journey midway owing to the atrocious syntaxes you are bombarded with. After going through a lot of tutorial hell, I believe (at least for me) the right approach was to start with Python. Now, you may be curious, out of so many languages why I have handpicked python. Now before I answer that, let's go through some stats about Python.

• Python is ranked as the most popular programming language (TIOBE Index).
• The language is widely used in Data Science and Machine Learning.
• Big Companies like NASA, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon use it.
• Python is considered a beginner-friendly language because of its easy-to-learn syntax.

Beginner-Friendly and Easy-to-Learn

Python is considered a beginner-friendly language. As a new programmer, you must understand the power of Computers and Programming Languages in general. Because of its easy-to-learn syntax, the language is often used in many academic courses, and teaching materials. Apart from that, you have a huge developers' community to get assistance from. Another common roadblock that you face in other languages is that you need to type too many line for the same output that you can do with fewer lines in Python.

Let's look at how that translates into code. In the following examples, you will see how to print "Hello, World!" in different programming languages.

C Language

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
    printf("Hello, World!\n");
    return 0;
}

C# Language

using System;
class Program {
  static void Main(string[] args) {
    Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
  }
}

C++ Language

#include <iostream>
int main() {
  std::cout << "Hello, World!\n";
  return 0;
}

Java Language

public class HelloWorld {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
  }
}

Javascript Language

console.log("Hello, World!");

Python Language

print("Hello, World!")

So you can see from these examples that some languages are syntactically complex for beginners.

As a beginner, you need to understand the power of programming, and what you can achieve with it. Python is a good starting point in such regard. As you develop yourself as an experienced programmer, you will eventually bump into other powerful programming languages which are aligned with your goals.