Which Programming Language I Studied First and Why

A short introduction

I am attending the University of Padua, Italy, studying Computer Engineering. Now I am quite good at programming even though I have an infinite more things to learn (obviously!). Before University i barely knew what programming was about. The reason I attended a computer-based course is I love computers, I wanted to know better how they work and I wanted to learn programming so I could control them. So, what is the first programming language i studied?

The short answer

The short answer is Java. It was the first language I studied, not the first language i tried to study. I am going to explain myself.

Why I advise you not to start with Python

During the last months of High School when I already knew what I wanted to do I decided to approach myself to programming just to have a general idea. So quite randomly I tried with Python (people was saying it was easy). I failed! Why? It was too easy. What i mean? Python does by itself too many things, so using Python I didn’t understand what I was really doing, I didn’t get the point of programming. It felt like magic. I had been writting “print(“Hello World!“) and magically on the screen «Hello World!» was written. But, what was a function? I was using classes without really understanding what they were.

Moreover in Python you don’t have to write down the type of the variables, it was a problem for me. I couldn’t understand what types was!

With Python I couldn’t understand so many things about computers and programming as it is so simple it does a lot of things for you (Garbage Collection included). I learnt more things about computers and programming once I started studying Java. So I suggest you not to start with Python.

Why I advise you not to start with C++

I will be brief in this paragraph talking about C++. Maybe I will focus on it in a another article. I just want to say you: C++ is an interesting programming language but I don’t recommend it to beginners. It is harder to learn than java, you have to deal with memory and pointers manually, memory leak are much easier to meet, etc. It helped me to understand (finally!) what garbage collection really was. Python and Java have Garbage Collection, C++ hasn’t it, so when I had to do his work on my own in C++, I understood what it does. What I listed above are not C++ weaknesses, but strengths. I just don’t recommend you to start with it. It is too much for what you want at the beginning.

Ps. There is actually ways to use automatic garbage collection is C++, but if you don’t know it, you are not going to benefit from it. You have to implement and use it consciously. So we can say it doesn’t have automatic garbage collection.

Finally, why I recommend you start with Java or with similar programming languages

My advices are:

Start with a object-oriented programming language. Java is one of them. If you understand classes and the concepts behind them, you climb the highest mountain. For me classes at the beginning were really hard to understand.

Start with a programming language which has an automatic Garbage Collection. Java has one.

I think is important that the language you start with asks you to write the type of the variables. {Es. Java : int num = 3; “int“ is the type}. Why? So you understand that not all the variables are the same. Different variable, different way to deal with it, different way to save it in memory. Different variables require a different number of bytes in memory.

Java syntax is considered quite hard and complex, it is not though extremely hard to learn. If you understand Java syntax and you get used to it, the syntax of the next languages should be quite easy to you to understand. This is not always true obviously. Golang syntax was complex for me at the beginning even though I knew Java and C++. Golang is a programming language.

Conclusion

I see Java as a programming language which stands between Python and C++, this is the reason I told you something about them too. Python is so easy that it could be confusing at the beginning, C++ is so hard that you could understand nothing at the beginning. Java is not extremely simple but you can do it with hard work. It teaches you some of the first things you should know about computers and programming.

Finally I recommend you two things:

Once you learn the basics, learn and implement some Abstract Data Types (ADT). It helped me to learn even better the Java concepts.

Read a lot about programming (es. I read the book “Programming: principles and practice using C++“ by Bjarne Stroustrup, «the creator of C++») and read lots of lines of code written by others.

Thank you for having read my article. I hope I added value to your knowledge. Consider leaving a comment telling me what you think about it, I will read them all!