haha chiken, always good for a laugh.

I learned HTML and basic CSS in 2nd grade, believe it or not, and I designed user-lookups on neopets. That's an example of how easy HTML is. Me and my friends did that all the time way back when…

Anyways, Python is going to be really useful in the real world, it's in fact what is used for Civilization 4, I believe. It has no interface though, if I remember right… I'm pretty sure the only python editor is DOS style.

C++ is going to also be a major help. It is what all of the Unreal Technology is based off of, as well as many other games. It has a great interface in some programs, others are just like notepad.

Visual Basic is a pretty decent language to learn as well. There is a nice interface, and it is very eeasy to learn, if you can find a decent tutorial. It is more aimed towards making applications, however.

Pascal is what Game Maker is made in, I believe. I believe it was made in the Delphi Pascal editor… So, what that tells you is that Pascal can do everything that GM can do and more. I think there are professional games coded in pascal, but I'm not quite sure of any off the top of my head.

So, yeah, those are just a couple of the languages that you might be considering.

I would definitely recommend GML. Although it's much, much more forgiving than your average coding language, it's great way to learn the basic ideas behind programming.

HTML itself wouldn't be too great to learn, but if you take it a step further and learn PHP you might be doing yourself a favor.

wtf happened to my comment?

ZOMG I SAW DIS ON A GAVE STONE!!!

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(spaced so it wouldn't be parsed..)

ZOMG!

You can Go:

GML –> HTML/CSS –> PHP/MySQL –> JavaScript –> Another awesome language.

After you learn all those languages and have some decent experience the harder languages will be a piece of cake.

Err. For all the GML recommendations…

Also, my friend sent me something a while ago on programming. Here it is:

Programming? First of all: I'm not a good programmer. I can do some *very* basic stuff and write high standard webpages, but I can't write huge programs that actually do anything useful. I can give you some tips though.

I learned all my programming skills online. There are plenty of tutorials and stuff. The first thing you should read is http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html - How to become a hacker. It's very important and basically all programmers have read it.

Then you should learn html and css. And _javascript if you want. But you should definitely learn them.

Languages: Here's a basic rundown of all the popular languages:

Python: An excellent beginners language, this is what I'm in the middle of learning. Learn python back to front before trying C. Python programs are slooow. Bittorrent is written in python.

C: The most popular language for building high end user applications. Amazingly fast, but very very hard to learn. Linux is written in C.

C++: An extended version of C. Learn C before attempting C++.

C#: Part of microsoft's .net package. I don't know much about it.

Java: I don't know very much about java. It's meant to be easyish. Java programs are also very slow. Azureus is written in Java.

_Javascript: Completely different from java. Learn this if you want to make cool webpages.

PHP: Also for web applications - This is for serving dynamic content. Don't ask me any questions about PHP.

GTK / QT: These are GUI widget toolkits (for creating point-and-click programs). The GNOME desktop environment is written in GTK and KDE has some connection with QT that I'm not sure about because I don't use KDE. I've started learning pyGTK, a GTK extension for python.

Languages not to learn:

Any BASIC. They're badly thought out and teach you very bad things. If anyone tells you to learn VisualBasic, ignore them, they are complete newbies.

COBOL, PASCAL, Fortran, etc. These languages are ancient!

Perl: Learn to read perl, but don't learn to write it. That's what I've been told. Perl is meant to be a waste of time and it can't do anything python or PHP can't.

Equipment: A linux distro, internet access. That's basically it. A good python editor is "DrPython" and a good html editor is Bluefish. Chances are your first many programs won't have GUI's, so they'll have to be run from the shell (a bit like DOS).

OK now, C++/C or Python.

VOTE people.

BTW[vote]