> Where should a beginner who is interested in coding start?<p>Python is a very easy language to learn and is also very powerful.<p>> Is there a language, like latin, that can help form the basis for understanding other languages and make learning easier?<p>Assembly language. It's a text language that corresponds one-to-one [1] with machine language, the numbers which are given directly to the CPU for execution [2].<p>I would <i>not</i> recommend assembly language to a beginner, but rather to an intermediate-level programmer who's already proficient in at least one other language. The main problems with it are (1) it's not portable, (2) it's not easy to find tutorials and documentation geared toward beginners, (3) it's not easy to find programmers who are comfortable with it, and (4) it tends to produce very long, difficult-to-read programs.<p>So even if they know assembly language well, most programmers don't use it directly very much; there's a reason that it's mostly a dead language outside of very specific areas.<p>Learning assembly language immensely helps your understanding of how computers work, and gives you some idea of what operating systems and higher-level languages must do behind the scenes to provide the tools that they give you.<p>To summarize, assembly language is a mostly dead language, with very limited direct practical use in modern times, which, when learned, will greatly help your general understanding of other languages -- and which cannot be avoided if you want to master complete knowledge of how computer software works.<p>[1] Modern assemblers often provide higher-level tools like labels, macros, and linker data, so the correspondence isn't necessarily one-to-one.<p>[2] I originally said "used directly by the CPU", but modern CPU's, at least in the Intel world, translate the user software's machine code into a proprietary internal code that's only visible to the hardware. This is largely a workaround for the fact that the x86 is constrained by backward compatibility to be a CISC-style machine, even though we now know RISC-style machines are much simpler and faster. The extra abstraction layer provided by the translation from backwards-compatible user instruction set to the internal proprietary instruction set means the latter can be RISC, can be shuffled around however the chip designers want, can use a strange number of bits per instruction, can be tied closely to tiny architecture details which may change in next year's chip, can actually change instruction order to increase speed as long as we can prove it doesn't change the semantics of the user program, etc. And all we software people see of this is that, inside the CPU, magic happens -- which makes our programs run faster.