Over at Lifehacker, Sheila asked what’s the best first programming language to learn. Software is so ingrained into what we do that I have often asked this question of my CS buddies. Just like many people believe we need to be multi-lingual to globally compete, it seems we have to be software-lingual (?) to meaningfully contribute and innovate.

Here’s a ranking of recommendations by the number of times a language was mentioned in the comments section:

c (117)

javascript (67)

python (66)

visual basic/vb (38 )

ruby (22)

perl (18 )

html (15)

php (14)

javascript (11)

pascal (10)

vba (9)

lisp (9)

linux (9)