[latexr]

The best advice anyone can give you on this is to “just pick one”. Analysis paralysis is death and is going to waste your valuable learning time. Understanding programming concepts, which you can do with most languages, is paramount and will make you equipped to switch to something else later on.

That said, some languages can be friendlier or more useful than others. Start with a scripting language, not a compiled one.

I’d recommend Ruby over Python, as it’s more expressive and less rigid with invisible characters. In Ruby you often find yourself thinking “I wonder if this works” and it does.

But if you don’t have a particular goal in mind, I’d even recommend p5.js above those. It’s essentially JavaScript for making art, with a large community geared for new learners. The best part is that with very little code you can have graphics on the screen reacting to your inputs, which is way more exciting than modifying text.

[karmakaze]

The thing I like about Python over Ruby is the one way to do a thing mentality. Ruby reverses this and has multiple ways from keywords if/unless and standard library filter/select, find/detect, etc--this drives me batty. The other infuriating is the subjectively surprising uses of the ! suffix on method names. `compact!` is a double whammy which mutates in-place (as expected) but also the return value is sometimes self and other times nil.

[latexr]

> The thing I like about Python over Ruby is the one way to do a thing mentality.

In my experience, Python utterly fails at that goal. I wrote about that in another comment years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34246550