Your first programming language
This is a common question everyone asks themselves. In my opinion, Python and Rust are the two best languages to start with. While Python will give you an easier time to begin, and plenty of jobs that actually exist, Rust is going to be a bit harder to begin with, with way less jobs.
As the title suggests, I’m going to recommend Rust. Why? Lots of reasons. I believe Rust will be the language of the future, so by the time you learn it hopefully there will be jobs waiting for you.
Rust also will teach you proper coding practices. As it is stricter, it will force you into the right shape and mindset for a programmer, and not someone who stitches things together that delivers delicate programs that break in strange ways just by looking at them.
The Rust community is very friendly. You’ll have a lot of people wanting to teach you the language and help you along on this. Python is a bit of hit-and-miss, some communities might be toxic.
The documentation is solid, nicely written, and very easy to follow. The reference docs might be a bit complex to understand at first, but after the first month or two it becomes very practical.
Rust has potential to be used for anything. Web, games, embedded devices, operating systems, browsers, you name it. There are still several gaps at the moment of this writing due to the nature of Rust being so new; over time more libraries will be created and mature, so right now there are several types of applications where Rust might not be fit. For now.
Python is very powerful and is able to do most of the applications that you might want to do, and it is very quick to write and get results with it. But it has several downsides (one is performance) that are very unlikely to disappear in the next 10 or 20 years1.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that much which language you start with. As long as you can learn to code, the language isn’t that important. All languages have lots of similarities, so much that when you learn the second one it will take 99% less time than the first.
And you can’t count on learning a single language (i.e. Rust) and hope that this would be all. There are always languages that are very good at one thing, and you should learn those too. Because you don’t want to spend a week doing something in Rust that takes 1 line of Bash to do, if there’s no real reason or benefit2 for it.
So, no worries, you’ll be fine. You’ll learn other languages over the course of years and that will take less and less time as you go.
As usual, there are several companies trying to make Python faster. Some efforts are going through “compiling” typed python code with great speedups. There’s also PyPy. But the community at this point does not want a “typed Python” so I don’t see the performance being fixed in the near future.
I’ve seen someone write a full Java application for several days, trying to make it as fast as possible, and someone else came up with a Bash one liner with pipes that did the same thing 2x faster, and they basically spent 5 minutes writing the line. Use the best tool for each job. You should learn more than one programming language.