#beginning programming

Let’s do a bit of Process of Elimination:

Languages close to the hardware-level are a bit too complex to start with, so everything C++ and below is out

Scripting languages are usually more for specific utility, and might be too far a branch of the family tree of programming languages, so those are out too.

Java was the language I was taught first, mainly for school class reasons, but it seems to have fallen out of favor for programming games

With this completely rough filtering out of the way,  and a tough of my own personal bias and experience added in for good measure, here is my suggestion: The C# Language.

C# is a good start for learning programming in general, as it has a lot of features you can see in most other languages. In addition, a lot of Game-making tools (I think of Unity and MonoGame) use C# as the language of choice, so those tools will be of use to you to help you get started.

Alternatively, if you really want something on the screen as fast as possible with little work, you may also want to look at Processing too. It’s based on Java, but a lot of the work of starting to see results is done for you (plus Java and C# are pretty similar, so translating should be easy enough after a while).

In my previous post I said that the equal sign is an operator. An operator 'operates' (oh wow) on values (operands). The equal sign is the assignment operator. It assigns a value.

costOfBurger = 1;

So here the value of 1 is assigned to the variable costOfBurger.

Certain operators don't operate on every value. Values have data types. In the previous post I declared a variable:

int costOfBurger;

The variable costOfburger can hold values of the data type integer (whole numbers).

You can declare variables of the same datatype on the same line:

int wholeNumberOne, wholeNumberTwo, wholeNumberThree;

Operands other than the equal sign are +, -, /, * etcetera. Another data type is string. You can't use the * operator on strings (example of string: "anything between the quotation marks, even numbers"). "A little" * "A little" = ... yeah right.

Using variables and operators we could make a counter!

int counter; counter = 0;

Now we want to add 1 to the counter:

counter = counter + 1;

Because this is so common most languages have an operator specially for this:

counter++; (also for substraction of 1 -> counter--;)

Also counter = counter ... is a bit dull to write so you can also do the following:

counter += 1; (adds 1) counter -= 1; (subtracts 1)