Good beginner programming language?
Let’s play our game… If you’re looking to better manage your development team, why not take a look at the languages they’re using primarily. If you’re just wanting to establish a basic understanding of syntax, programming conventions, limitations and patterns, then go with something basic. PHP or Perl would be my suggestion for you. C#/ASP.NET is definitely what you’ll need to do if your team develops primarily on Windows machines, as Loser mentioned. It has a sharper learning curve, since you may find yourself learning a lot of Visual Basic to interact with ASP, and none of the three are very forgiving when it comes to stupid mistakes. Ruby (on Rails) is the last thing you want to look into. It’s a simplified psuedo-language, created by 37 Signals to make web application development completely simplified. “Learning” it will do nothing, except to show you how many switches you can flip and pieces of code you can paste to have an entire, simplif
If you want to learn programming, start by deciding on something you want to build, even if it’s somewhat simple (preferably simple, actually). In my experience, it really helps to have a short-term goal when starting learning programming. For a counter-example, see the canonical “hello world” introduction to programming many, many languages have. Useless! You don’t really need to be an expert to understand MORE about the programming side of things. Good luck!
