Languages for programming

Depends what you want to make What is the goal?

Why the 'haha'?

There are lots of languages to choose from and you will get lots of different answers depending on

a) Who you ask

b) What you are trying to do

If for example you want to develop little desktop applications for Ubuntu take a look at quickly this uses glade to design a user interface and is programed in python.

Writing games for the Web you may want to consider Java or Flash

Large applications are usually written in C or C++

Web pages with dynamic content may be easiest is perl or PHP

and there are lots more.

Let us know exactly what you want to do and we can advise further. But don't be surprised if you get differing opinions.

I guess I've never looked at it like that before. would like just to learn the basics of programming so i guess just build small programs for Ubuntu that i could use.

Thanks both of you! you guys are also helping me with my other problem :)

The fastest way to get a desktop app would be quickly

Take a look here

http://developer.ubuntu.com/resources/tools/quickly/

Or if you decide to go with C/C++ then you need two things the compiler and an IDE

for the compiler open a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T)

sudo apt-get install build-essential

For the IDE my personal choice is Eclipse but there are others

sudo apt-get install eclipse-cdt

Assuming this answers your question please mark as solved

If you want to start learning programming without caring of stuff like compilers at first, I recomment Python.
It comes with Ubuntu and many important parts of Ubuntu are actually written in it.
Python is easy to start with and easy to read, also it gives good error messages.

There are some online courses from Google incl. videos at http://code.google.com/intl/de/edu/languages/google-python-class/ .
What you need is just an editor of your choice. Later you can choose development environments if you like.