by Lam Luu

Created on: July 07, 2008   Last Updated: March 10, 2009

Programmers do not only write in a language: they think in term of the language. And, like speaking language, each programmer thinks much more naturally on the first language: first love is always nice, is it not? Therefore, a good language to start with is vitally important. It has been shown, again and again, on how much such language affects its learners. These affects can last years to come. Thus, choose the first language wisely, or you will pay dearly.

However, it is also important to make clear where you learn programming. I would say there are two main environments: class and self-study. They are very different. In the former environment, the learners are constantly monitored and helped. They have someone to ask when they have a question. Furthermore, in an introduction to programming class, especially classes for computer scientist and professional programmers, learning programming language is just the mean, not the end: these classes are to equip the learners with understandings, insights, and concepts of programming. On the latter case, self-study, there situation is much more severe: the learners don't usually have that much attention, and they must seek help themselves (usually in the libraries, book stores, or Internet). Furthermore, these learners need to be able to apply what they learn quickly to "keep the fire" in learning, since programming is very difficult. Plus, they have no one to tell them the concepts, understandings, and insights of programming except the work of programming itself.

In principle, the first language should be strongly typed, referable statically typed. It should be clean, expressive, and elegant. For classroom situation, the language should also be simple, even minimalist, to save time for the class, and should also support all of the programming paradigms well (or, alternative, allows to do all of those paradigms); ability to add new syntaxes would be a plus. For self-study situation, the language should be popular with considerate libraries, with large community. For both situations, the programming language should NOT be one of the super-popular languages (including C++, Java, C#, VB) which are prescribed for all problems on Earth. Simplicity, cleanliness, and elegance must have high precedence over immediate usefulness.

From those perspective, for classroom usage, a functional programming language is ideal. Among all of those languages, ML, Scheme, and Common Lisp are very good, since all of them have strong support

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