I want to start learning programming. What should I start with?

[routsounmanman]

Game_boy said:

routsounmanman said:
For little programs doing basic to medium things I'd recommend
Visual Basic ( easy to use yet quite powerful ) or C# For games Java or Flash ( for web games something like my signature )

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

All of those languages have proprietary implementations, so either you slave yourself to Microsoft Windows (C# and VB) or a virtual machine (Java*, Flash*) that you can't see the workings of. It might not be so bad now, but when you're locked in in the future and that's all you know you will have a problem.

*You could use IcedTea and/or GNU Classpath.

*That includes Silverlight or Shockwave.

Use Java just to learn how to program and make pretty colours, and then use C++ and an OpenGL abstraction like SDL as a precursor to full OpenGL programming.

Don't ever use WinAPI or DirectX.

I said Flash only if he wants to make web-based games, as there's practically no competition ( except Java ).     I also said Visual Basic because he said he wanted to make simple programs, so it suits. He obviously isn't going too serious into this :/

Lastly being a "slave" to Windows is no biggie; he probably won't make programs for other operating systems and the Flash player plugin is free and widely used.