this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Learn Programming
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So, if you're brand new and want to learn concepts of how to write code, I might suggest a game. There are a lot of programming games. Obviously it's never a one to one about learning something useful, and a lot of them even make "bad" things useful (though not bad enough to think it's going to teach you bad habits you won't be able to unlearn). I really enjoyed Exapunks, but it's sort of unrealistic. The Farmer Was Replaced looks fun as well and uses a "simple Python-like" language, but I haven't played it.
If you sort of already understand the concepts and want to dive into a real language, well, it's hard to say what will be fun. Chase your fun. It might be easier to think about what's not fun and avoid languages at the start that deal with that. For example, if setting up an environment to code in is the problem, then maybe something like JavaScript would be a good place to start. It runs in your browser! Press F12, click "console", type
alert("Hello, World!"), boom, done, you just did Hello World in JavaScript without downloading anything at all.I'll toss TIS-100 onto the list of programming games although that one teaches you a pseudo-assembly language as well as how to think about concurrent programming. Then there's Human Resource Machine although that one is aimed at absolute beginners to programming and teaches a sort of visual assembly, and then its quasi-sequel 7 Billion Humans which extends the concepts explored in Human Resource Machine into parallel processing (this actually makes a pretty good soft introduction to GPU programming and shaders).
I actually played The Farmer Was Replaced and it's just straight up Python, not even Python-like, it just locks a lot of the language features behind campaign progression. It was OK initially, but gets kind of annoying at later levels because they intentionally hold back a lot of the tools to easily solve problems and make you solve them in a more verbose and annoying fashion first.
TIS-100 and Shenzhen IO both felt annoyingly limited to me in ways that Exapunks didn't.
The reason I say "Python-like" is because that's how their store page describes it.
Interesting. I did find Shenzhen IO to be a bit annoying but that was more because it forces you to use circuit design to solve certain problems rather than just brute forcing them via programming. Weirdly I couldn't get into Exapunks while I found TIS-100 really interesting.
I suspect the reason that they call it Python-like is because I don't believe it allows you to import any libraries or anything into it and they don't want people to think they've got a full Python interpreter that can do all the normal Python things. Essentially it's Python syntax, but without the normal Python runtime. There's probably some more advanced Python-isms that are missing as well, but I've not used Python enough or played the game enough to really run into those things. E.G. I don't know if it lets you define new classes as I never bothered to try that. I kind of got bored of it once I got towards the later levels and didn't really see any reason to keep grinding to unlock what were just extra challenges in the game.