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[PokemonRocks85]

Hello Bay12 members i am wondering if there is a good programming language i could learn. I wanna make games so tell me what is the best programming language out there.

Ex: Python, java , c+ and more thats what i mean by programming language.

[GlyphGryph]

lol

best programming language is HASKELL hands down. Its what all the big companies use, man. Definitely the language to go with.

[PokemonRocks85]

Is HASKELL easy to learn?

[Sir Finkus]

I hear nothing but good things about brainfuck.

[Rose]

I hear nothing but good things about brainfuck.

I second this, though lolcode is pretty good too.

[GlyphGryph]

Is HASKELL easy to learn?

Do you want a language that's easy to learn, or a language that's actually capable of churning out some awesome games?

If you want something easy, though, you should try out FORTRAN - it's a bit like Haskell light.

[kaijyuu]

ZZT-OOP is the best programming language ever devised.


If you disagree you're wrong.

[GlyphGryph]

Heck, yeah, what was I thinking. ZZT-OOP is actually BUILT for games.

I'm changing my vote to support kaijyuu's suggestion.

[Starver]

Whitespace.
Oook.
Quad.

But seriously, have you got an end result in mind?  Learning Java will get you an easily portable (and web-based) audience for such works as you eventually release.  C++ is probably where you want to head off to if you want to make fully compiled executables (not as automatically portable, but you should be able to make them 'port'able, and recompile them for different platforms) that can be fast and much more powerful, but I'd probably suggest starting with C[1] to get the basic non-OO principles off pat.

Python promises to have an approach that's... if not best of both worlds, certainly without some of their obvious failings.  Not sure how commercial it is, compared to the other two (not seen many "Python Developer required, for immediate start" adverts, as opposed to equivalents for the other two), but you'd be in good company.  I've got a Python book at home that I'm about to start reading, properly, whose first section's few introductory quotes basically equate to explaining the difficulties with the C-family/Java family, and then round it off with a Monty Python quote.  You have to be there, but the first few paragraphs proper suggest in the (obviously biased opinion of the author) that Python is the way to go.  I've yet to establish that for myself.  I find Python easy to read, but I've done precious little of my own writing in it, yet.

I have a soft-spot for Perl, especially for my near-eternal prototyping prior to going into whichever one of the other languages I can work in, I but I don't think it's going to be much use for you.  But it is good for working ideas out, if you don't mind then realising that the final target language is more strictly typed, or some other botheration, and you need to implement a lot more work to get a given simple Perl sub or block working in this other dialect.

I can also offer advice on COBOL, Forth, LISP, Pascal/Delphi, various BASIC subsets, etc, etc, and that general advice would be that they either don't do the kinds of things that you want them to do or the way of getting them to do them is not worth the bother or just plain not in the modern paradigm, even the likes of the BASICs that are specifically games-orientated.  Still, they're each fun, in their own ways.

Not that you'll be getting anywhere near it, and it's of a similar irrelevancy level to COBOL, but avoid Ada like the plague!  Most horrible language that I've ever used.  And I'm including COBOL and some of my own intentionally awkward/obtuse esolang implementations in that comparison...



[1] Albeit that you might be having to learn Object Orientated approaches after you've already gor a function-orientated mindset, but hopefully you'll still be malleable, in that regard.  There are intermediary Object-C dialects, but I rather jumped straight from K&R to ++.  And as yet have yet to be convinced to try C#.

[Heron TSG]

C++ is an industry standard, and rather powerful.
Python is something you'll need if you want to work on many open-source projects. (As it too is open source.)
FORTRAN or Assembly are good math-doing languages, though FORTRAN is quite a bit easier.
JavaScript is good for... scripting.
HTML5 is the way of the future, man.
Whitespace is secretive.

[Strife26]

Have you ever learned a language before? If you haven't, you may want to start with something simple. I've never found the need to learn anything other than QBASIC, myself.

[optimumtact]

I wouldn't listen to any of the half rate developers in this thread, the only language you'll ever need to know is the machine language the computer itself speaks.

[Starver]

Have you ever learned a language before? If you haven't, you may want to start with something simple. I've never found the need to learn anything other than QBASIC, myself.

I more or less started with BASIC (BBC BASIC ZX81 BASIC, actually), if you ignore a bootstrap-by-dipswitches thing on a hobby kit prior to that, which was basically machine-code but which I'd really only copied from a cheat-sheet.  But BASIC of most varieties isn't necessarily the best introduction.  You're rarely going to use BASIC to get any proper end product out of the shop, and it's structurally and syntactically incompatible with most of the languages that you would want to use.  But the knowledge was useful and transferable in doing LotusScript stuff, amongst other things, I suppose.  (Not game-orientated.)

My first higher-level was a variety of Pascal (also handy when I later got into Delphi, but hadn't prepared me for OO principles in that), and I've made games in that, but it's a bit old.  Delphi gives you the UI look, but I don't think I'd use that (or its Lazarus incarnation) for anything not entirely functional, these days.  Skip a few other languages, and the Ada that I spoke of was taught at university as a modular (not OO) language that aided collaboration, but I hated it and never encountered any graphics library functionality (doubtless there is one).  K&R C and C++ came later, for me, and were probably the only non-interpreted languages I was involved in in that era that I consider relevant to the OP.  You peek and poke video memory almost as good as with assembler, although these days you really need to interact with a DirectX or similar intermediary, anyway, for the top-notch stuff, which is yet another issue, and one which I've not gotten around to messing with.

Java came to create and fill its own niche, later, and is also relevant for the situations I've already mentioned.  (Personally, I think I need to brush back up on that lingo.)  Only recently have I looked much further than all these (and Perl), onto (or back to, from earlier encounters with similar languages) to Lua, Scheme, Tcl and the like.  But very few of these are implicitly gamer-codings (though can be used to drag various things kicking and screaming into a game-like format, if you want to...  You ought to see some of my stranger GIMP plugins... ).

And Python is the latest in the stable, I hear good things about it.  I'm worried that it might be like my early attempts to use PHP after being a Perl-kiddie for so long, though, being so used to one language's so-similar foibles that I make errors wherever the various dissimilarities occur...


Not that you can't program a simple game in .BAT language (or, more easily, one of the 'sh' shell variants under Linux), and it's all experience, but such shell/command scripting languages bring their own problems and don't introduce you to the good techniques you get to/have to use in the OO interpreted language instances.

[GlyphGryph]

Also if you go to the programming thread there are some REALLY good tutorials written for stuff!

I'd like to push Ruby, but games really aren't what it's for. Although its getting more efficient every day, and I think JRuby is on par with Java for efficiency now (and has access to all the Java libraries), so that might be a decent choice.

[Gatleos]

My advice would be to slog through C++, wailing and gnashing your teeth through every painful lesson of memory management and OOP all at once. It creates highly-skilled, paranoid and xenophobic OCD nutcase programmers. The kind that get RESULTS!