Look at it this way: if you had someone who was trying to learn to drive a car, would you recommend a Ferrari to learn the basics? We are taking about beginning programmers here. Should a competent programmer know about these things? Yes, of course, in due time, after they master the fundamental concepts. Would C with its pointers and no-bounds checking on arrays and 'manual' memory allocation and freeing be a good language for beginners? No, not in my opinion. If the question is what is the language to use for systems programming in Unix/Linux then I'd say C, and Java has its use too. Which code would be more easily understood by a beginner? Which language would you rather learn if you didn't know anything about programming? (Aside: Does taking out the return 0 in C make it really that much more comprehensible?) Simply take a look at the 3 examples above. Unlike C or Java, there is no need for separate steps of editing source files, compiling them and then running them early on, nor are explanations about 'header files' in C, or the whole public static void main incantation in Java needed :) Nor why we use puts() or () when we really want/mean 'print'. They can open a shell Python window and type in Python statements and observe the output immediately and interactively. Beginners can focus on programming concepts, not extraneous matters. I already outlined the benefits above, there is much less conceptual baggage with Python (or Ruby for that matter). The question was what language is good for beginners My answer is (and stays) Python. My intention is not to start a 'mine is better than yours' language war. If you google, you'll find a lot of Python tutorials on-line. Just to provide a quick example to convey the flavor, here's how to print 'Hello World' in C, Java and Python: You may want to visit for more information, perhaps this Beginner's Guide to Python will be useful. Python also comes with its own IDE named IDLE, it's not super-sophisticated like eclipse, but usable. That means, you can open up a Python shell window and try out commands right there without having to edit a file and save and compile it. It's free, cross platform and can be used interactively. So while you can write non-functional code, it'll always look nice :) Its syntax is straight to the point, and teaches you good habits in terms of formatting your code (unlike other languages, whitespace, ie indentation etc matters. It's quite powerful and flexible, and supports both imperative and Object Oriented programming paradigms. While it looks very simple, it is not a toy language, it's a language used by Google, NASA, YouTube and many other places.

I too would recommend Python as a friendly, accessible language without excessive syntactic sugar.

Linux programming language list