Good beginner programming language and proprietary hardware requirements

[Ad hoc]

What is a good beginning computer language?

Also, do projects such as the ones on makezine.com require a proprietary language for their own hardware?

Thanks

 

[mgb_phys]

Python is probably my recommended first language.
It simple, there are lots of books and tutorials.
It's intepreted - you can just type a line and see the result without needing to compile.
It supports lots of styles of programming, procedures, objects and functional programing.
Plus there are lots of libraries to do useful things with it.

If you want to build hardware/robotics you are probably going to ultimately need to know C.