I just started playing Half-Life for the first time a few days ago. Would you recommend playing Black Mesa in lieu of Half-Life, or in addition to it?
Keep in mind Black Mesa isn't quite finished, they are still polishing off the final levels. But there's still a good 10-20 hours or so of gameplay.
There's also some features that are broken in the Steam release of HL1 vs the original Sierra release if I remember correctly but that's another bag of worms.