My son is 14, in his first year of high school with a focus on computer science. Even though they don’t really dive into programming yet at school, he asked me to teach him.
I started out myself with Amiga BASIC, then moved on to C — long before university. I still remember how crucial it was to first learn how to think like a programmer, not just how to type code.
So, I chose Python: clean, readable, no pointers or type declarations.
But to my surprise, the indentation-based syntax actually confused him quite a bit.
We switched to Swift, and thanks to its use of curly braces, the code structure became much clearer for him.
Later, we came back to Python, but this time with more confidence — and it finally clicked.
Now I wonder:
– Was it just me not explaining Python properly at first?
– Or maybe Python isn’t always the best first language, as people often assume?
What language did you start with? And what would you recommend today to someone just starting out?
