Hi. I'm not really a developer but I soon hope to be. But the first thing I need to know is programming, which I know next to nothing about. I've tried my hand at simple Python but with so many articles and YouTube videos saying all sorts of languages are "The best to learn" or "A must know code language", I really don't know what to do. Hopefully someone here can help me the figure out which language is the best for a beginner programmer.

Choose any language and stick with it.

Doesn't matter which one. Everyone out there has a different opinion about the best language to start with, but in reality you'll eventually learn more than one anyways.

The most important thing is that you actually keep coding stuff.

@deadlyRants I heard that C++ is a pretty hard language and I've kind of tried it. Is it still possible for a beginner to learn it?

Stick with python if you have started it. The secret to programming is simply consistantly doing and learning things. Thats it. Ps dont learn c++ yet, it is better than it use to be, but it will be slower to learn.

Meh I don't think language matters as much as we all like to think. If you can think through a program through on paper your good to go.

Language doesn't really matter when you're starting out. If you start with c++, you'll need to learn things like memory management that you wouldn't need if you did python. Python has concepts like higher order functions that aren't used a lot in c++.

As others have said, the most important thing is you pick a language and stick to it. Also make sure you're constantly writing code. You may know concepts, but you don't understand them until you've written code with those concepts. I'd advise you start with codeacademy to get the basics down.

Decide what you want to build and choose a language that suits it

Don't learn a language - learn how to program. Learn about common constructs and how to break a problem down into solvable chunks. Get yourself to http://codeacademy.com and work through some of the exercises and courses.

@Syndicate01 given that there's no real "best" language to start with, I would suggest PHP, C# or JavaScript as these are most in demand commercially.

@Tored any suggestions as to what meets that criteria? I'm just asking as the OR (original ranter) doesn't have a clue about any language.

@Syndicate01 to answer an earlier question of yours: yes, C++ is learnable for a beginner

In fact, it was my first language (and it's still my main one)

Other than that: the language itself doesn't really matter that much. Just choose one that you think looks pretty and then keep using it throughout your studies. As another one already said: you'll learn more languages later anyway, so don't think too much about it

@GigaMick (JavaScript + HTML) or Python would be such languages