I learnt BASIC mostly by myself when I was in elementary school (because programming computers must be cool, and I was sure I could do it). I self-taught mysel

I learnt BASIC mostly by myself when I was in elementary school (because programming computers must be cool, and I was sure I could do it). I self-taught myself computing concepts all my life. I self-taught myself Python (in earnest) while in MBA school (because I believed spreadsheets needed to die and Python would be a good spreadsheet killer). I've been teaching Python to other students in the last few years. It's usually their first programming language (if not, R probably was). I've always believed in being a computer language polyglot, if only to be able to communicate with others from other languages and to learn what those languages have to teach us, but I'm also of the opinion that one should stick to one's strengths. I would agree that we should think the initial programming language doesn't matter - if we're simply looking at whether we can communicate or translate fundamental mathematics of computation. However, when a student is an adult trying to get immediate value from the learning (instead of the gratification of increasing pure knowledge, like I did) their choice of language matters greatly. My first recommendation to anyone asking me is of course Python, due to broad applicability (which means learning one time a language that can be used to scrape the web, provision a restful API, or do complex data analysis), license (free to use), cross-platform compatibility (MacOS, Windows, Linux), popularity (which leads to ease of getting help), all leading to a good reputation for readability and maintainability (which is encouraging broad industry adoption meaning more jobs for Python programmers). Of course, for specific applications, the recommendation may be different, such as JS or TypeScript for front-end development, or C or Rust for low-level programming, or Lisp, Elm, or Haskell for functional programming in their respective domains. Further, Haskell and Elm have greatly informed my approach to object oriented programming - I feel like they have made me better and made my Python more robust and straightforward. I didn't learn them first though. In retrospect, I feel like I could have easily learnt them first. I wonder how I would look at my Python if I had done so - what would indeed be different? I don't know. But I do know, for pragmatic purposes, first programming language does matter greatly.