Easiest Coding Language To Learn?

[ApacheTech Consultancy]

To be pedantic; HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS are not programming languages. They are scripting languages.

Syntactically, VB.NET is probably the easiest programming language to pick up, and (more or less) converts straight to C# when you're ready to learn that. If you're already familiar with the C-style syntax (PHP, JavaScript), maybe go straight for C#.

Visual Studio is the best IDE I've ever used; it's massively extensible, extremely friendly for beginners and experts alike. It is miles ahead of every single other IDE I've come across. You can use it for C, C++,C#, VB, VB.NET, F#, Java, Arduino, Python, Perl, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more. For web development it comes with it's own dedicated test server with a full debugging platform. There's nothing I can really say bad about it.

Edited March 8, 2013 by ApacheTech Consultancy

[ApacheTech Consultancy]

Update: I've found something wrong with Visual Studio...

...Visual Studio 2012.

It's unusable. It's horrible. I hate it. I hope Metro dies soon, and VS2012 dies along with it. I've literally now only just installed it and Microsoft have destroyed the best IDE on the market. It's vile. They destroyed Windows with Windows 8 and now they've destroyed VS with VS2012. Metro is the single worst mistake Microsoft have ever made and I hope it hurts them badly enough for them to ditch the whole stupid, useless and idiotic project.

Stay away from VS2012 at all costs until someone can fix this utterly broken, piss-poor excuse for software.

*sadface*

R.I.P. Visual Studio. You will be sorely and bitterly missed.

Edited March 8, 2013 by ApacheTech Consultancy

[madviperseven]

VB.Net is a somewhat easy language to learn. Some people, such as myself, find lower-level languages like C and C++ easier to learn because their relationship to the machine code is more direct and intuitive. As ApacheTech Consultancy stated, VB.Net segues neatly into Microsoft's other .Net languages, which is imo both a positive and a negative. You will dedicating time and mindshare to a single platform and the producr of that platform is generally belligerant toward other platforms, further .Net could disappear into a puff of smoke like so many other proprietary products. C and C++ have stood the test of time and are developed by a relatively neutral standards body (ANSI). Binaries aren't cross-platform but can be cross-compiled and C/C++ compilers are available on virtually every platform. Another disadvantage of VB.Net is the tiered version model means you need to pay for more functionality and code you find written by someone with Pro might not even compile with Express. (Academic versions are available though!)

Having said all that, doing the GUI stuff is obviously much easier in VB.Net. In spite of the quarks of working with .Net, you'll still develop fundamental skills (structured programming, OO, etc.). You can produce programs rapidly and it can be fun (although some things are actually much easier in lower-level languages (ie working with raw TCP/IP).

I've never worked with python, but from what I do know I think it might be your next best step. It's free, open-source, cross-platform and higher-level than C/C++ (meaning you wont have to deal directly with memory and system calls). Also, I believe you can use Python as a scripting back-end for a web server, so you can take what you know about web-languages and build from their until you decidide to get into client-side programming.

In summary:
VB.net, if you want to quickly write GUI-centric programs
C/C++ if you find working with higher level languages more difficult (some people do)
Python if you want to build incrementally upon what you already know (my recommendation)

Have a good day,

mvs

[digip]

VB6, FTW!!

[ApacheTech Consultancy]

One thing I would say about VB.NET; as soon as you feel confident with it, jump over to C#. You'll get a lot further with C# than you will with VB. Both learning wise and in industry.

I stuck fervently with VB for a long time. Whilst learning the intricacies of .NET, I was searching high and low for tutorials and example project written in VB and there wasn't much around. Whilst learning C# you have all the help of the community at your fingertips.

VB.NET is more powerful than C#. That comment will probably be jumped on by C# fanboys, but the cold hard truth is that it is. Because VB is Microsoft's baby, they've introduced a lot more into the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace than into Microsoft.CSharp. VB has elements of hyper-level programming_* in it which make C#'s implementations look low-level in comparison, even though they're both on the same plateau. In C#, you sometime even have to Interop over to Microsoft.VisualBasic and borrow some of it's functions because C# doesn't have any way of implementing them itself.

Having said that, C# will be infinitely more useful in the world of work. Once you understand and can read through C-style syntax, you can quite easily pick up many other languages which use the similar syntax base. From VB, you might be able to go onto Delphi or Cobol relatively easy, but pretty much everything else will require learning a whole new syntax-base.

_{* I'm not sure if this is actually what you call the step above high-level programming, if it's not this, it should be! :D}

[digip]

When I was first learning VB, this site was indispensable for basic examples - http://www.planetsourcecode.com/.

Was easy to look at code and then change what I needed to make my own programs work and accomplish my goals. Sadly, I don't work on that side of the fence really and focus mainly on Web and Graphic design since thats what I do for a living but for beginners, its still a great resource for "hello world" and up examples in a multitude of coding languages. Much of them, very bad and unsanitized input, so take with a grain of salt, but certainly worth the help for beginners wanting to be self starters and just learn by picking apart others code and changing values to learn the ins and outs.