Probably the most unpopular opinion here but PowerShell.

My main reason is that it’s extremely easy to learn and is a good intro to object orientated programming.

People bash it but it’s extremely easy to inspect objects, get any properties and methods associated with that object or class, walk through all the properties of the object and transform that into whatever you need.

It has a very fast turnaround time when developing code as you can run tiny snippets at a time and understand their outputs before moving to the next bit.

I’m not a Dev and end up having to write python from time to time and I hate it. At one point I just needed to understand an object in a variable and I couldn’t do it, the command dir exists but it didn’t give me any of the info I needed. There’s a function in PowerShell called Get-Member (alias: gm) that you can pipe anything to and it will show you all those details of the object.

It helped me tremendously when I was just starting out.

Its super powerful, it can do anything C# can do because it’s built on it, you can also run inline C, C# and C++ code with on the fly compilation.

It’s also OSS and cross platform.