Original tweet. Looks like Twitter changed their code so archive.today doesn't work any more. :(

I think it's a bit of the reverse... I'm very fond of the Python programming language, but in a lot of ways I don't think it's ideal as a first programming language. He goes into how every computer used to start up in an IDE, however primitive, and now it's too much for the speshul snowflakes to install a language, but he misses that the language that IDE used was BASIC. And despite a number of reasons real coders don't like BASIC, especially the old-fashined BASIC where every line of code has a line number, I think it's a much better language to learn in.

I've helped teach a few people, programming, and the one thing a number of novices find surprisingly hard to get is how a program is stepped through linearly. How a computer is, in one sense, a complicated clock that ticks through its instructions. Isolating blocks of code as functions is very nice but it can derail that concept and leave students struggling to understand how the processing is ordered.

Gonna leave this here, there are a number of other reasons I think BASIC has an advantage, and other reasons why BASIC could be better, but I don't really feel like writing a dissertation. :-P

I'd recommend Python as a good language to dabble with; Python is interpreted but very powerful, and a number of practical projects have been written in that language.

One way to teach yourself is to examine open-source programs that do things you're interested in, and alter their behavior. You may want to find out what programs you're currently using are open source and think about how you'd want to improve them.

All that having been said, basic programming is pretty basic, but real computer science is a branch of mathematics. To be a good programmer you need to have a good grounding in math up through algebra at least and trig for a lot of it. You'll also need to study some general techniques programmers use; pick up some books on data structures and algorithms.