Programming

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Looking for recommendation to start programmi (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello friends, the title is mostly self explanatory. I would like to start programming but I also feel like I am not very smart, so I would like a programming language that is easier to grasp than others. That considered I don't hope to be able to learn something "powerful" but it would be nice to still be able to do some useful things. Something I would love to do is make games, I know those are usually made in C, which is a very difficult one, but maybe some simpler games can be made with other languages.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you want to make simpler games, you could start with scratch or stencyl. These tools aren't really programming languages per se but they let you build programs out of blocks that are much easier to visualize and play around with. There's some research that suggests they are good entry languages and some research that suggests they aren't, so ymmv. I've used both, but I knew how to program already.

For the record you shouldn't let "usually made with" drive your decisions. Java is still popular for some games. Slay the spire, a very popular deck building game, was written in Java, which is a decently popular choice if you want to support modding. But C++ and C# are more popular simply because that's what you use if you're using engines like unity or unreal.

side note: C, C++, and C# are all different languages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I knew they are different but I also assumed they're at least similar, is that a wrong assumption? Will learn one make little difference if I learn another after?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Learning how to program in any language will make it easier to pick up any other language, because the main burden for a beginner is how to think programmatically. However once you're enough past that wall, being an expert on one language will mostly only help pick up languages that are similar. So if you knew C++, you could pick up the syntax and probably most of the semantics of the others very quickly, because they are similar in that regard. But you'd still probably struggle to actually program in C, because C is lower level (has way fewer features) than C++.

Technically speaking, C is a subset of C++. But that doesn't mean being a good C++ programmer automatically makes you a good C programmer.

C# is similar to the other two in syntax as well, but it's much more like Java than either of them.