I started with
Basic.
Crap.
I had a look at
Ada.
Too complicated.
I tried out
C.
Too complicated, too.
I studied some
C++ samples.
What the *~#!?
I learned
Pascal in
school. And I
loved it from the first time I used it.
Why?
Well, it's the
ease-of-use of Pascal that makes it interesting for both
beginners and
advanced (
hobby)
programmers. You can't do anything wrong (well ... at least not that much as with C), because the compiler won't let you do anything wrong. And if you don't have any problems with thinking logically and developing algorithms, Pascal is the best PL to use.
Borland's TurboPascal 7.0 has a very nice
IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and a complete help with examples. There aren't so much
standard Pascal-
statements that you couldn't
remember, there are a lot of
pre-defined procedures to solve problems, you can create include files (
units) and you can integrate
assembly-language directly into your programs (and, if you're
masochistic, also straigh
machine-code). Also is the syntax-design very clear, logic and easy to understand / learn (which is not case in, for example, C++).
This means that you can even program your own
OS (if your crazy enough to ...).
Okay, it's got no Windows-capatibilities, but for Windows-programming, you can use
VisualBasic. And the real programmer is loyal to his text-based OS ... or not ? ;-)