Whatever programming language you end up learning @redya I recommend you to build several projects (even if they’re simple) as soon as possible. This will make you learn faster and also have the benefit of having a portfolio you can show to clients or future employers. Good luck! 
csisnett
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mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
I would. People are different. I even could not parse from your message whether you think Ruby is much easier to learn, or Perl (I can do both and I doubt which one had a steeper learning curve.)
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LukeWood
I personally think you’d be better off learning something more traditional first like C, C++, Java, etc.
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hauleth
Do you have any source of that? Because of the languages I know and I am aware of then it probably wouldn’t make into first 10 of the hardest languages.
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aimerib
Blockquote[quote=“hauleth, post:15, topic:34319”]
Do you have any source of that? Because of the languages I know and I am aware of then it probably wouldn’t make into first 10 of the hardest languages.
[/quote]
I’ve been a long time crawler here but signed up just to participate in this conversation!
I certainly agree with you here.
I think that what makes English hard to learn is the same thing that also makes it easy to get started with it: it’s an extremely flexible language, and you can express the same thing in many different ways. This flexibility, coupled with the extensive materials available for learning the language, and huge quantity if source material make it a very accessible language for one to get immersed in. English is a little bit like Ruby and JavaScript, in that regard. You need to know a lot less to be productive with it it right away. That same flexibility can also make things very confusing, and sometimes the “best solution” isn’t obvious, or isn’t necessarily agreed upon by everyone.
These are only my personal observation, so no sources for that, just opinions.
On the topic of learning Elixir, honestly, knowing Ruby first has actually made Elixir a little harder to learn, only because the syntax looks a little (a lot?) similar between the two, but the language itself behaves somewhat differently to the point that I felt it was easier if I just stopped trying to compare them in my head period. I can’t think of where I heard this, but how I came to Elixir was from hearing somewhere about how Elixir was a better Ruby (along with Crystal, which I’m yet to check out)
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malloryerik
Maybe something like Racket could be a good first language if you’re interested in Elixir. There are others better equipped to judge than I am, but Racket has a fantastic beginner’s book, How to Design Programs, designed to help you think beyond mere syntax, and it will lead you in a more functional programming direction that will be useful in learning Elixir and also, it seems to me, in learning JavaScript.
Racket is a Lisp so it will look a bit alien, but even this may encourage a useful mindset. Though it’s well-designed, you’re unlikely to use Racket except as a learning language simply because from what I can see it’s more popular as an academic than commercial language, and in fact the book I’m recommending is uses a customized version called Beginner Student Language. Then when you try Elixir or JavaScript for example, the differences as well as the similarities will be insightful.
If you’re interested at all, I suggest checking out with the book’s Prologue: How to Program which will get you set up with a text editor and coding some simple and fun stuff very rapidly.
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tfwright
Maybe you are thinking of non-European languages?
Here is a paper comparing literacy acquisition among European children (it is a fact that it takes English speakers much longer to master reading) and exploring the possible objective causes: https://www.pitt.edu/~perfetti/PDF/Seymour.pdf Obviously there are sociological and other factors that make studying ‘difficulty’, well, difficult, but it breaks down plenty of objectively complex dimensions to English.
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hauleth
Not only. As a native Polish speaker I think that English orthography is more on the “easy” part, and this paper didn’t picked any hard languages, only Finnish, which may seem hard on the first sight.
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Alex-Anev
I’m not the most experienced programmer around so don’t take my words as gospel. However the man who taught me Elixir did say it is easier to learn when you don’t have the coding practices of other languages already embedded in your head.
As tfwright said, its better to learn javascript and/or python since that’s the easiest way to find a job. But definitely consider learning Elixir on the side if possible.
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mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
Finnish is longer than German, and I consider German being somewhat hard, so Finnish must definitely be even harder.
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