I for one, was just skimming and nearly missed the second poll. That is probably the case with many of us.

Also, I noticed that some people did not fill out the second poll. I wonder why. First one has 88 votes, and the other one has only 65. Weird.

23 difference, 12 of those could be the non-programmers who don’t know enough about the languages to make a choice (that includes myself)

I’m a Java guy myself. I work on enterprise applications for work and most of my coding at home is done in Java. I do tend to tinker with other languages from time to time though.

I came up in the C (not C++) realm and I honestly think it’s the best place to start. I may be biased since I learned this way, but I feel like most of the essentials for programming can be learned in plain C. Then one can learn object-oriented programming through some other language (I actually started in C++).

I also feel it is essential to have some experience with functional programming. I’ve dabbled in LISP, Scheme, and ML and found the experience very rewarding.

I just looked at the polls today… Holly Haskell Batman! I am totally surprised that, Haskell is tied with Java and PHP in the “currently programming in” poll.

I expected C, Java and PHP to be the top 3. Did not expect to see Haskell there. Interesting.

None of my readers seems to be using Ruby – I expected at least a few votes there.

Also, I noticed that some people did not fill out the second poll. I wonder why. First one has 88 votes, and the other one has only 65. Weird.

If you think Java does many for you, Python makes the coffee and cleans the house ;P

But seriously, Java isn’t a bad language to start: C is too much for starters (most of my peers still didn’t grasp the whole “pointer” concept) and Python doesn’t give you good programming habits, as it’s very little strict.

Java also appears to be used in the real life, though I still struggle to understand why…

Good to hear you say that. At the beginning all the syntax was a little confusing but I’m past that stage now and finding java to be quite logical. My lecturers very often mention things that you had to do manually a few years ago which java now does for you. That seems extremely convenient right now but I’m sure it’s going to cause me pain if I try and learn C or C++ in the future. Oh the joys I have to come!

@Sam Weston: Java is not a bad language. It is just verbose – but it is a fine place to start as long as you can deal with the boilerplate, and the fact that everything must be encapsulated in classes, and all it’s other quirks. But then again, all languages have funny quirks.

In fact, Java has grown leaps and bounds since I took it at school adding stuff such as generics, automatic boxing/un-boxing, a sane printf function and many other new features. So it’s not going to hamper your progress as a programmer. :)

I’ve been doing java for two months now for my computer science course at the university of southampton. I’m aware of your opinion about it as a first language but I haven’t found it to be bad at all. That said, I have no real experience of other languages so my opinion means very little at this point in time.

Not a programmer, but interested in the tech stuff (excepting the technical details of how to do function x in language y which come up sometimes)

Well… we do some “programming” at college for the Computing course, but when it’s only VB or VBA in Access, I don’t think I can really count myself as being a programmer… I’d rather learn a proper language before I call myself that.

Don’t know what language I would choose to use though – Java sounds like quite the workhorse in terms of being used for lots of things, but Python sounds more friendly in terms of not being too verbose or boilerplate-ful. C and variants thereof go to the other end of the friendliness spectrum but are probably also good to know…

Won’t be long before I’m on a CompSci course at uni, so I’ll likely start off by learning whatever they want to teach, try and learn good programming practice from that since it’d be the first time I’ve actually been taught how to code, then from there try and learn other languages.

For now though, keep a steady flow of interesting randomness and off-colour humour flowing and I’ll be fine ;)

I, on the contrary, moved from Thunderbird’s RSS viewer to Google Reader. Thunderbird is quite bad to use from keyboard only and as I sometimes have to use other computers an online aggregator is much better.