What language should you learn first?

The breakdown Read some stuff on the internet and you will see everyone has an opinion on which language you should learn if you are just starting to program. 1. Hippies: Python, Smalltalk, Visual Basic, Java. This school assumes most beginners don't need to know anything about pointers or garbage collection, and a lot won't at all. If they ever have to learn these things, they are better off picking it up after getting the basics of object oriented design and general logic down. 2. Masochists: C++, C. Learn the hard way and everything else will be easy. This school weeds out anyone not wholly committed to the idea of coding their whole lives. They'd have you do assembly if they had the time to proofread it and comment how terrible and hopelessly inept you are, assuming you can get anything to work. This method works best if you are a wunderkind that heads development on major Javascript frameworks at aged goddamned 12. 3. Pragmatists: C# or .NET in general, Javascript, maybe Java, whatever your company/school uses. It's possible you'll pick up the concepts necessary to be a decent programmer, but you need to be able to code several things right now and the theories of software architecture can take a back seat until you have more time. An of course there is mixing and matching, which is probably more common than any complete adherence to any school. My story I cut my teeth on C++ back when all the cool kids were doing it in high school, but when I started doing Running Start classes at the local community college in my junior year my embarrassingly poor math skills at the time precluded taking basically any CS course. I did manage to make a very inelegant Tic-Tac-Toe program with a pretty decent AI, but that was the sum total of my experience. The book I had probably wasn't a good idea to use (I picked it up at the remainder book store I worked for at the time). Later, when I got into Geography (and GIS specifically) I went through a slow evolution: from the moderately crummy visual ModelBuilder program in ArcGIS to VB.NET - the latter via a course my wife took before I did and aced - to Python, and finally now fooling around with .NET stuff but looking back at C++ again. Where to go now At the moment I am kind of between #2 and #3. The one professional coder I know insists I do some lower level (meaning, closer to raw machine language; meaning harder in general) language. Specifically C++, which he could then critique. This would be a really really good idea and is extremely nice of him to offer to do. Long run, I'll probably be a better programmer for doing it. At the same time though, I know a bit of C# already, everything in the office is .NET, and there is a really good chance I'll be using it very soon. Particularly because the small stuff I have written at work (mostly Python) is likely going to be kept around and maintained in some way. And that means moving it to .NET because no one really uses Python here. I'd have real projects to do as opposed to homework from my friend. Also, there are free in-house training programs for it. I'm almost certain to go with #2 because of the long term prospects of actually being good at this (which means versatility) and also because if I am hired on here as a GIS Developer they'll train me anyway. "Specific language is actually unimportant," I've been told. What matters is understanding what you are doing when you give a computer instructions, what object oriented design means, and good practices & algorithms. Anyone who knows the basics, logic, and elegance behind programming can pick up just about any major language in a day or two. My largely uninformed opinion on language C++ is actually scary as hell though, and never something I'd give a beginner. As other people have observed better than I could, C makes you do more work (garbage collection and memory management), higher level languages and .NET does it for you, and C++ appears to do it for you but can fail catastrophically if you don't know what is going on under the hood. Had I known about Python in my high school days I would have started with that, no question.