Need advice on learning programming

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The best way to learn programming is to use it to fix problems that you already have, and they don't have to be particularly big problems.

It helps to be language agnostic, because you simply can't use one language for everything, it's better to learn all the concepts common to all languages, and then put them to use where the problem needs to be solved, whether that's a shell scripting language in Linux, like awk or sed; Windows batch files or powershell script; PHP or Javascript to help you make web pages, or something that can be compiled into an executable if you want to make something other people can use with minimum understanding of how to install it.

Having coded in over a dozen languages, if I was to recommend a single language to start with I'd have to say go for Lua. It's getting ridiculous the number of places it's being used, from game interface scripting, like for WoW addons (and dozens of other games too), on web servers (not Apache, but the newer nginx) as a replacement for php, and now on the whole of wikipedia, and many other wiki sites, in the form of the scribunto extension, as a replacement for the gnarly old template language. It's even available as a minecraft extension, that'll let you control mining robots to help build things for you.

To put it simply Lua is far more elegant a language than the vast majority of others in regular use.

Of course if you want to make things hard for yourself, there's always Brainfuck