Best programming language for mostly-newbie to start with?

My history is similar to yours except maybe you saw the moon landing. I advise PHP. Avoid C and Java but do aspire toward Javascript, and (esp) Python.

also freebasic (don't think it's in the repo's but it works well) I would recommend python though

You could probably play around with shell scripts (Bash) to make something useful and get a feeling for programming again, you can learn it in an afternoon. Ruby is also fun to play with, the interactive console is great for trying things out.

Here's how to get started with Ruby:

$ sudo aptitude install ruby irb

$ irb

Then type in:

"hello".reverse

..and see what happens.

Because bash is so much better then c++ or because it's so difficult that you would have given up on programming all together?

How can I learn about "making something useful"?  I have spent a ton of time learning the syntax and following tutorials but only because I'm fascinated by it.  Not because I have any idea what the hell I can do with the information.

I'm also curious - what is it about Bash you don't like?

I arrived from a different direction - the first "language" I learned was html ("hyper text markup language" so it is a language in theory), then css, then php. Php is an actual programming language and quite powerful, though really focussed on web design. I had fun with it though (let me show off my sudoku solver ). Coming to Linux and shell scripts, Bash looked quite ugly at first, but when you get used to it it's fun because it's close to your operating system. Any commands you can run in a terminal you can put in a script, so it's easy to do simple things and gradually build up. Debugging is easy too because you can try out bits of code in a terminal, so I'd go along with the recommendation to try Bash, unless it gives you bad habits which work against you on the other languages which I don't know...

Now I'm trying to get motivated up to try Python, but at the moment Bash seems to cover my needs. Can any Python users suggest some cool/fun/useful things you can do with Python that would be hard with Bash?

Somewhat similar story (but older: moon landing, Fortran etc) and I asked an old school mate of my brother's and was recommended to go for Python (and PyQt). I can recommend Python too. I have had some fun as a Python newbie. I bought a couple of books before I found the one that really works for me: "Core Python Programming" by Wesley J. Chun.

It was meant as a brain teaser, spare time thing but once I got going with Python I found it pretty useful at work.

Good luck,

/Martin

I would suggest writing a few Bash scripts to get a feel for what can be launched, from where, and how:
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guid … index.html

Then maybe Python as it is straighforward and has a whole heap of online documentation:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide

Then for Guis and Applets etc, I would recommend Lua and Ruby for simplicity. I worked with nelsongs and andrefelipe on the Dreamlinux distro and they produced some awesome guis with Lua and Ruby.

I've recently gotten into Perl at work, and it is absolutely awesome, you can even write Guis with it, although IMHO it's main power is in searching for information and putting the findings to use. I use it for networking tasks

Everybody has their favourite language, you just need to use the one that achieves what you want quickly. For example, I won't write a complicated Perl script if a simple Bash script will do the job.

You probably hit the nail on the head here, along with being designed to be used primarily as an interactive shell.
I probably was a little harsh aswell, I just went on a little bit of a rant

I don't have an issue with 'then' being followed by a newline, but when you concantate it onto one line it should require a semicolon instead.

I agree its useful as an extension to commandline usage, thats why I mentioned the < 20 line exception, it tends to be in larger scripts that you fall over yourself.
your second point would probably support my point of view more than yours, looking at some one elses code, you ay think you undertand how some thing works until you modify it and get a really helpful bash error message, whereas the manual should point out bashs 'limitations'.
The fact remains tho, when I use python (I moved on from c++) I very rarely (never?) trip over the language, just my problem solving skills, which in my opinion is the way it should be (not that my opinion, very much like my problem solving skills, is worth very much ).

Re brackets
Yes they are optional (if you use the 'function' declaration), my issue is that it suggests function arguments, as with any other language, but you don't need them because arguments are accessed with $0, $1 etc so they're just syntactic sugar (that I instinctively want to put argument declarations in to).

Anyway I'm going to shut up now, I'm getting all ranty again

go for it (especially if you only know bash), I didn't find it hard to pick up, just try writing your next project with this open in a browser tab.