Quote Originally Posted by DuB View Post
d. Don't worry though, once you've got a grasp of the first language you'll learn pretty quickly that they're all basically the same. It's only the first language that's conceptually demanding. It's only differences in syntax, really.
Try going from C to Common Lisp or Haskell and see if you still agree with this. If so, I'd say you're writing one of them poorly. While there are classes of language for which this holds true, each language has it's own way of doing things.

Quote Originally Posted by SteadyState View Post
I'd start with HTML, JavaScript and maybe PHP. They're all web languages and I know you have dialup, but that shouldn't be a huge barrier to learning them. Perl is a nice one too (and it can be coded offline). It's one of the most powerful and easiest to learn languages out there IMO. Check that out.
My vote would be for PHP over Perl. The syntax in perl is downright perverse. The whole thing has the feeling of being a hacked together mess.

Quote Originally Posted by Xei View Post
To get you started, MIT does a very good lecture series:

YouTube - ‪Lec 1 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008‬‎

They use python which is a very nice introductory language.
+1 for python
Quote Originally Posted by Baggins View Post
I had a long chat with my teacher and he recommended Perl because in his words "You can come at a problem from a different angle instead of only one way to fix a problem with most other programming languages"
Perhaps it's worth putting this a little more explicitly: Fuck Perl. The language is a joke. It's largest constituency is sysadmins that learned it back in the nineties and poor poor souls that need to maintain the first generation of CGI sites that were written in it (if any still actually exist). Python is not just a great language to start with but a great language to use. Builtin syntactic support for decorators is incredibly cool and if you can' do it with a decorator, you can do it with a metaclass.