As a programmer who was a beginner not very long ago, I agree that Python is great for beginners and experts alike. Ruby is another decent candidate, for mostly

As a programmer who was a beginner not very long ago, I agree that Python is great for beginners and experts alike. Ruby is another decent candidate, for mostly the same reasons. Java and C++, the languages you usually see in university courses and the work place, are just god-awful for beginners. When I first started learning programming, I didn't really know what language I should study, so I flip-flopped between studying Java, C++, Python, and PHP, and learned them to widely varying degrees of proficiency. Then I picked up Javascript, then Ruby, then Objective-C, and now I think that's about all the OO languages I would have any reason to learn, and am now just starting to dabble in functional programming. I think the only reason I didn't just stick with Python throughout the beginner phase, is that I didn't really get what Python was "for." I thought it was just for desktop scripting. I didn't know about its GUI toolkits, or that you could write web applications in it. I learned PHP because I could immediately see the end use of it in my browser, and had no idea I could have used Python for the same thing. If I had to do it over, instead of studying such a smattering of languages, I probably would have started off with a crash-course in C and then quickly moved on to doing everything in Python (and Javascript).