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[Showbiz]

Hello Community

I really want to learn how to code (maybe for a little ascii game or so), but i've no idea where to start.
What programming language is the best to beginn with? C sharp, C++ or python?
Those game creation systems like Gamemaker seem handy. And what about Unity?
I've read that the language isn't very important, but to be spoilt for choice doesn't make things easier.

I'm thankful for a little bit of suggestions and guidance.

[alexandertnt]

I would recommend Python, if just for the fact you can run individual lines of code and immediately see the effect. Makes it easy to just kind of experiment and work out what does what. C and C# don't (really) do that. There are tonnes of tutorials and help out there for beginners.

I wouldn't recommend learning programming with one of those game creation systems, it might be a bit much to take in all at once, but your mileage may vary. Gamemaker's drag and drop is fairly easy to learn, but the software is quirky and kind of a pain to use. Unity uses C#, so any online Unity tutorial for beginners would basically be a C# tutorial.

Neither are really appropriate for ASCII games.

I first started off programming by making little ASCII things with Python and print(), it's a nice way to learn the basics.

[Arx]

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist is my personal all-time favourite programming textbook. I believe interactivepython.org follows along with it, and provides some neat tools.

[Arcvasti]

I would recommend Python, if just for the fact you can run individual lines of code and immediately see the effect. Makes it easy to just kind of experiment and work out what does what. C and C# don't (really) do that. There are tonnes of tutorials and help out there for beginners.

^This. Python is great and lacks fiddlyness in general. The libtcod module for it is decent for ASCII games and has a good tutorial, I've used it a few times. The only sillyness Python has is indents being meaningful instead of parentheses, which is mostly a redirection of debugging agony instead of an improvement.

Gamemaker is ehhh. You can make some pretty fabulous stuff with it, but I honestly believe its easier to just program it instead of messing around with it.

Unity is decent, but a lot of its fancy stuff is wasted on ASCII and IIRC its pretty expensive.

[Arx]

It's free until you break a certain profit threshold.

[Thief^]

This might work: http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike_Tutorial,_using_python%2Blibtcod

[Showbiz]

 I'm going to start with Python. Thanks a lot for your support.

This might work: http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike_Tutorial,_using_python%2Blibtcod

Awesome, that's really helpful!

[Sanctume]

Visual Studios has a free version, and you can use c#. 
And then SQL Server express is free also for small database. 

[Strife26]

Khan Academy has some stuff that might be useful, although I haven't stuck my head into it yet.

[Thief^]

Visual Studios has a free version, and you can use c#.

IIRC you can get a python plugin for Visual Studio too now.

I love Visual Studio 2015 as an IDE.

[DragonDePlatino]

I'm glad to hear you picked Python. I would make everything in Python if it had some better non-ASCII game development libraries. PyGame is nice but I very quickly outgrew it...Thankfully, what you learn in PyGame can be very handy for OpenGL programming in general (which is what Dwarf Fortress uses!)

If you're an absolute beginner, I'd reccomend checking out Bucky's Python tutorials on Youtube. Afterwards, start delving into game libraries like libtcod or PyGame.

[i2amroy]

I'm glad to hear you picked Python. I would make everything in Python if it had some better non-ASCII game development libraries. PyGame is nice but I very quickly outgrew it...Thankfully, what you learn in PyGame can be very handy for OpenGL programming in general (which is what Dwarf Fortress uses!)

Pythons nice... until you do anything that actually has speed as a requirement. (Seriously, I know a few people who's jobs are literally just writing embedded C/C++ libraries so that non-computer researchers can get half-decent speeds out of their programs in python).

But yeah, definitely one of the earliest and best languages to do your very first learning on IMO.

[wierd]

python is good for cutting teeth.

If you are hell bent on C/C++/C#, then try Bloodshed IDE.  It is really really free. (Foss front-end for GCC and associated toolchain.) both windows and linux flavors are available.

I must admit though, while maligned heavily, VB.net is a useful (in a niche sense) intermediate between simple scripting and building something before you can debug it.

Once you learn to think in loops, variables, and conditionals, the rest is just syntax.

[DragonDePlatino]

I'm glad to hear you picked Python. I would make everything in Python if it had some better non-ASCII game development libraries. PyGame is nice but I very quickly outgrew it...Thankfully, what you learn in PyGame can be very handy for OpenGL programming in general (which is what Dwarf Fortress uses!)

Pythons nice... until you do anything that actually has speed as a requirement. (Seriously, I know a few people who's jobs are literally just writing embedded C/C++ libraries so that non-computer researchers can get half-decent speeds out of their programs in python).

But yeah, definitely one of the earliest and best languages to do your very first learning on IMO.

Wow, really? I keep hearing C++ is overkill for most things but it's good to know this knowledge won't go to waste. I'm a weirdo who really likes Python's whitespace-dependency so if I could have one "feature" for C++, that'd be my choice.

If Bloodshed IDE isn't your thing, Showbiz, another good alternative for beginners is Dev-C++. Wait, what? Those are both the same thing? In that case, Bloodshed is what I started writing code with so I'd second that recommendation. It's a bit feature-light, but basic things like linking and compiling are much easier. Once you outgrow that, Code::Blocks is another nice free C++ compiler I've used for a few months.

But you said you were going for Python, right? In which case, I never used an IDE for Python but my current programming classes are forcing me to use Pyzo. It's not terrible but I've only used it a little so I can't say much beyond that.

[Sanctume]

If you have those computers from the 80s like a Vic-20, Commodore-64, TRS80?, Atari-800, those have BASIC compiler which I think is a fast way to delve into coding algorithms like loops and input and print. 

Text based games is pretty much a skeleton for a simple game: a loop to ask for input/command, a case/condition statement to interpret the input, and a goto (function) to do, and print the result (output) and repeat back to the loop.

Expand from there.  This can be done with Visual Studios too, or Python, or whatever--you just have to learn how to install the tools.

Whereas the built in basic compiler is in those circa 1980s computers gets one coding. 8k of RAM was a lot back then, let alone 64k.

I learned from copying code, understanding what the code does. I then modify the code and see my results.

I'm sure any beginning coding textbooks from maybe in the 90s will go over the early concepts such as Print Hello World, to variables, to booleans, to Loops, to Conditionals IF ELSE THEN, to functions and procedures, and more complex variables/arrays.

In visual studio you can create a old school console programs still without the fancy windows graphical user interface, just plain old dos shell looking program.