Hi everyone, I know that there are many topics out there but I would appreciate some personal help.

I have a small amount of programming experience (really only dipping my feet in the water) with Python, Perl, Ruby, C, C++, and C#. I haven't gotten proficient in any of them but I took a programming class and we briefly went over all of them.

My main goals in picking a language is finding something that will be fairly easy to start with that will develop skills that are transferable to C++ or another powerful "standard" language.

My main goal is making games I know to start small and I have several projects that I want to do before I make real games, and a simple game to start with. So basically I have a plan for getting started, I really just need help getting a language.

Thanks in advance

-Yam

Which language is 'good' depends on the game you want to make. Perl does not strike me as a useful choice, but me and Perl cannot get along very well, so I may be underestimating the language.

As a general guide it is always good to know several languages, if only to decide you hate one.

Without further information, since you conveniently listed six languages, I'd say throw a dice, and use the one it selects.
(With more information, like what (type of) game you aim to make, we may be able to give a bit more advice.)

If learning is your primary goal, it may even be useful to make the same game in different languages. The program will then not give many surprises so you can concentrate on programming it in the language of choice.

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Roll a D6, I like that

I don't think I want to do Perl or Ruby, but I felt it was important to list them.

If I'm going to do all 4 of the others, could somebody point me to some good compilers/IDEs?

-Yam

Languages don't really matter that much. If you plan for your games to be portable then it's probably better to stick to c/c++ so you can hit windows/linux/mac/ios/android. For c++ I have used visual studio, netbeans and qtcreator all of those are quite nice. I generally use netbeans for my day to day and I prefer the gcc compiler over msvc because of standards compliance and cross platform. I don't do too much C# work because it's a windows-centric language and I like portability but visual studio and monodevelop both work well. I don't really know of a python ide, most people I've talked to that use python use vim or emacs and not a traditional ide.

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What about Java? I have a book for Java that I got from a friend and I would like to learn, but I have heard Java is really slow to work with.

Java is fine to, you can target window/linux/mac and android with it. The most popular ide is eclipse however netbeans is good as well.

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Unlike popular belief, a language is not fast or slow. Only implementations of a language have a finite speed.

Disregarding that issue, speed of an implementation is a non-issue about 90-95 percent of the time (ie pretty much all code you write). Processors are insanely fast compared to humans.

Even if you are in the last 5-10 percent, how you programmed the solution often makes a larger difference than the actual raw speed of an implementation.

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Idle is the usual IDE for Python, haven't spent much time in it to recommend it though.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
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Idle is not very good, the interpreter continues to run, so the environment may be messed from the previous time.
There is also pydev, an Eclipse editor for Python, but IDEs are mostly useless anyway with Python; the language is too dynamic to do code completion.

I use just gvim and a terminal next to it (use emacs or another text-editor of your choice if you hate vim/gvim).
Together with 'focus follows mouse' (imho the only sane way to work with a mouse), it works great.
Edit, save, move mouse to the terminal, cursor up (command-line history gives me "python myfile.py" from the previous run), hit enter, see what the program does (and messages stay displayed in the terminal so you can check them later while editing), move mouse back to editor, edit, save, ...
I have yet to find anything that beats that.

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My project: Messing about in FreeRCT, dev blog, and IRC #freerct at oftc.net

I guess I'll just try several out when I get home and go from there.
Thanks for all the help

-Yam

Myth: Java not suitable for games.

If you're comfortable with Java then it will be just fine for games and you're unlikely to find the language and virtual machine to be a cause of performance concerns. Theoretically you could optimise code in another language to be more performant, but unless you're an expert programmer with a solid knowledge of your target platform that simply isn't something that will actually apply to you. Modern Java VMs also aren't nearly as slow and inefficient as some people would have you believe -- that's more of a historical problem that was a real issue with earlier versions of the language and platform.

I really love and recommend JetBrain's IntelliJ IDEA as an IDE for Java development, and the community edition is freely available with plenty of features. Netbeans and Eclipse are also very popular though, and the most important thing is to find an environment you are comfortable with -- try out any options that interest you and make your own informed decision based on your own preferences.



If you're willing to spend some money PyCharm is a really good development environment with some great features including code completion that works quite well. Apart from the time-limited trial there isn't a free version on offer though. A lot of programmers do prefer to simply use a syntax-highlighting text-editor rather than a full IDE for Python development, although I find some of the other features -- especially code navigation, refactoring and debugging tools -- can really help with larger projects.


Hope that's helpful! :-)

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- Jason Astle-Adams
From my blog: What next? Intermediate to advanced C++ | 20 ways to advertise your game | 4 reasons you aren't a successful indie developer

Please be careful who you quote

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My project: Messing about in FreeRCT, dev blog, and IRC #freerct at oftc.net

When I said slow to work with, I meant the syntax makes writing code slower, not that it runs slowly.