What programming language should I learn?

I know how to program in QBasic, but that is getting quite old now and as well the programs don't run on Vista. So, which programming language should I learn? I just want to program easy things, maybe like a Tic Tac Toe game or something like that.

What programming language should I learn?
For most noobs, C++ makes the most sense, since it is by far the most prevalent language, is easy to learn and you can find community support for it very easily.





If you want a career in programming, which languages you should learn is one of the the wrong ways of thinking about business success.





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Reply:If you want to program for windows only then vb.net 2005 will be great place to start however you will have to pay for it.





If you want to get practice in programming properly then a great language to learn is Python which is supported across all major operating system therefore your code much more portable.





It is great language to start with as it teaches you efficient, well structured coding which is will serve you well with any language you learn after that. Best of all it is free and well supported in the community.





Java is often mooted however for a first attempt at a modern programming language I think it can be hard going. Best to come back to that one after you have learned a lanugage or two and are comfortable with them.
Reply:Hi. Since most things are going web-based now, you should check out www.w3schools.com. It has many beginner tutorials on different languages such as php, html, etc.





Hope this helps!





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Reply:I have always liked free things. It's not that I'm poor, but I like to try out things. And I'm not always sure what I want, anyway.





You might like Visual Studio Express Edition. I have tried it, its free, runs on Vista, is easy to learn, makes nice-looking programs, has lots of learning resources, an included IDE (editor) and has a BASIC (VisualBASIC) component. The 2005 version is available now: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express... and the 2008 version in in beta 2. It does lock you in to Windows, of course.





I have used the 2005 version and I like it. The 2008 beta will stop working in march 2008. The 2005 version won't.





NetBeans is really nice too, you can download it with JAVA. It is a nice IDE (editor) but as someone else has said, it is a little difficult to start out with. Its free too. Your programs can run on Windows and many other platforms, as well. Even things like PDA's and cell phones. Search for Netbeans and get the whole package.





PHP is free too, but is used on webservers, not usually on the desktop (although you can). For web devopment mostly, and it works really well with MySQL, also on webservers. You can find free website places that use it, too. You can get a nice development server that installs PHP, MySQL, and Apache on your computer free from apache friends. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.ht...





I'm not sure that's what you're looking for though. To make the tic tac toe thing, you probably want the Visual Studio Express Edition 2005.
Reply:Sounds like you don't want a job as a programmer, and just want to build some basic applications.





C++ etc. will be way too advanced and as much as I would usually say it's the best language to learn as it forces an understanding of memory management and object oriented concepts, I wouldn't recommend it for you.





You could learn a web based language, but that wouldn't be necessary if you just w ant to run this in Windows Vista.





I would go with Visual Basic.Net. It's definitely going to work on Vista and is a relatively simple language to learn. While you don't need Microsoft Visual Studio to program VB.Net, it will probably be difficult without it. You can get more information from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/...





You could also consider Java. The great thing about Java is that it will run on any operating system and, for the type of coding you are wanting to do, you can get everything free.


Download the Java SDK from java.sun.com. It even has a developer environment (similar to Visual Studio, but for Java) called NetBeans that is free and can be downloaded at the same time. Alternatively you get download eclipse at www.eclipse.org which is another free development environment and is more popular that NetBeans





There's a ton of tutorials for Java on the Web and a huge community.





Good luck!

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