In my experience, unless you really enjoy programming and want to learn how a computer works, dealing with C is hard. As a professional embedded software develo

In my experience, unless you really enjoy programming and want to learn how a computer works, dealing with C is hard. As a professional embedded software developer, even after 3 years of programming in C, I sometimes have to stop and think about complex pointer structures. So if you just want to play around, do cool stuff quickly and get moderately good in programming start with python, beware it might be hard for you to come back to C. But if you want to become more than good and really understand what advantages python gives you, start with C. There is little extra effort involved: just implement every data structure in C once and learn about pointers. You will become a much better programmer. Also, you will enjoy coding in python more, once you know C. I guess the shorter answer is to start anywhere. The longer answer is the question of whether you want to enjoy the act of programming or the results that you achieve with programming. In the former its start with C, in the later its start with Python. SIDE NOTE: As caseymarquis said, if you want to go the python route, go for javascript. There is little lost in the process, but the value of doing something cool is exponentially increased.