What should be your first programming language?
I started programming when I was 16 years old and studying in class 11th. After completing class 10, it was time to decide the major subjects that I would be choosing to study for next two years and maybe my whole career.
I was already decided on choosing PCM(Physics, Chemistry and Maths) as my main subjects. But for the additional subjects I had many options like Physical Education, Hindi, Biology, Computer Science, etc. Most of my seniors and relatives warned me to stay away from Computer Science as it is very hard to study and score good marks. But, I had a love for computers so decided to go ahead with Computer Science and ignore the advice of others.
The programming language that was a part of our curriculum was C++ and SQL. Learning C++ as my first language was a blessing in disguise. It may seem intimidating in beginning but it is all worth it.
C++ has many advantages like:
- Pointers help us to understand underlying memory management.
- Object oriented language which helps in writing modular and clean code.
- Strongly Typed language, helps in understanding all the data types.
- Most of other languages share similar syntax to C++.
After joining college, I participated in programming contests a lot. C++ helped me to ramp up very fast on performing good in contests. After graduating, I gave all the job interviews in C++ and it is considered to be one of the best language for DSA/Problem Solving round due to its vast STL library. In most of the companies that I worked majority of backend services run on Java. Java is very similar to C++, so learning curve was very smooth.
Many recommend python to be the first programming language. The reason is mostly because of easy to understand syntax. But if you really want to become a Software Engineer you should never shy away from complexity rather dive deep into it.
