One of the first questions or doubts that comes to mind once you set the goal of becoming a developer is what programming language is good to start.

In this post I want to cover two points:

• Why you shouldn't care that much about it.
• Tips to identify what can be a good fit for you.

Why you shouldn't care that much about it?

The main purpose of developers is to deliver solutions, The nature is to find and build solutions for problems and make tasks easier for others, just look how many apps and software you are using in day to day basis. Because of that one of the main characteristics a developer have to have is good problem solving skills, curiosity and hungry to learn, and then the other part is defining instructions for the computer in a way they can understand to build the solution.

The purpose of developer is to find and build solutions for problems and make tasks easier for others

To strength the first aspect most universities start with algorithms, and I am not talking about those complex mathematical ones, is sequence of steps to solve a problem using pseudocode in a way to focus in the main concepts: Declare variables and functions, loops, etc.

Good problem solving skills, the main concepts of programming, use of best practices, design patterns are the key that will help you to understand any language.

Pseudocode is a style of algorithm writing that should be adaptable to any programming language. There are no rules to write pseudocode but it should be readable by a programmer.

And you might think: "ok, I get it. Anyways I need to learn my first language". Bear with me, let's see some tips to discover that language that you'll fall in love with.

Tips to identify what can be a good fit for you

• All of us had a reason of why we fell in love with programming It could be a game we played, an application we used and wanted extra features, an event we attended whatever. Been aware of that software that attracted you in the first place will give you what field of programming is the one that call your attention: Games, Desktop, Mobile, Web Applications.

• Look for the top languages used in those categories and research about its strengths, use cases, applications that use them, syntax.

• There are apps that gamify learning basic concepts of programing languages, one of them is sololearn it is a good option to explore, code and get help about certain languages when you are starting and feel like you are playing after that you can go deeper in other platforms.

• If you want to learn to start a job, lets say within 6 months or a year a good options is identifying what programming languages are the most requested in Jobs in your country.

Wrapping up

Whatever your first programming language I can tell you the most important thing is that you learn how to code, best practices, and try to build and build more things, because in that way you'll discover more use cases than following tutorials always and bear in mind that after that first language you will be able to pick up a second or third language faster in case you needed.

I hope this post had been helpful for you, thanks for reading and have a great day.