If you’re a beginner programmer, the toughest part of learning programming is to decide where to begin and which language should master for career benefits.
But as time goes, you’ll start to discover which programming language will be most suitable for you, your interests and career goals.
Before picking a programming language, you’ll have to answer these questions:
– What kind of projects do you want to develop?
– Do you have a background in mathematics and logic that might help you?
– Do you prefer to work on the front end or back end?
– Do you want to go freelance, get hired by an established company or work with a startup?
In the list below, we go over the best and most in-demand programming languages for many of the most common use cases including web development, mobile development, game development and more.
1. JavaScript
The first programming language we’re reviewing is JavaScript.
JavaScript is commonly used along with HTML and CSS, and it is essential for front-end web development that creates interactive web pages and displays content dynamically to users.
JavaScript is the top language used on GitHub, with the most contributors in both public and private repositories and organisations from all over the world.
Furthermore, it is one of the friendliest programming languages for beginners. However, you need to learn other supporting languages and frameworks to have a career as a front-end developer for desktop, mobile app or game development.
2. Python
Python is one of the most user-friendly programming languages. Python’s syntax is clear, intuitive and almost English-like, which makes it a popular choice for beginners. It is one of the most used programming languages, and Stack Overflow calls it the “fastest-growing major programming language”.
Python, as a full-fledged language, can be used into different types of projects, including developing APIs, crawlers, scrapers, backend systems, and so on.
If you’re interested in back-end web development, for example, the open-source Django framework, written in Python, is easy to learn and feature-rich. Django is used in the bulging of Mozilla, Instagram and Spotify.
Python is the main language behind some of the most popular technologies, today such as AI, machine learning, Big Data and robotics. Python libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and OpenCV are used to build programs in data science, machine learning, image processing and computer vision.
3. Java
Java continues to be one of the most popular programming languages. According to TIOBE’s data, Java has been on the first and second positions more than any other languages for a couple of decades.
The main reasons behind the popularity of Java are its portability, scalability, the large community of users, and its philosophy “write once, run anywhere”.
Theoretically, you can write Java software on any device, compile it into low-level machine code, and then execute it on any platform equipped with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This means Java is highly cross-platform compatible.
Furthermore, Java is the basis for the Android OS and the most popular language for developing Android apps.
Even though Kotlin is slowly overtaking Java, Java is still a very popular language, great for beginners to learn, and it’s used in many introductory programming courses.
4. Swift
First announced by Apple in 2014, Swift is a relatively new programming language. Despite of this it’s going strong in the last few years.
Swift is intended to be a faster, and easier to debug than its predecessor Objective-C. Swift has been optimised for performance and built from the ground up to match the realities of modern iOS development.
Developing Swift programming skills is a wise investment for aspiring software engineers. Not only does iOS run on every iPhone and iPad, it’s also the basis for other operating systems such as watchOS and tvOS.
Furthermore, Apple isn’t going anywhere as tech industry leader and iOS apps continue to be the most profitable in the mobile app marketplace.
5. C#
C# is a modern object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft. It was designed for developing apps on the Microsoft platform and needs the .NET framework on Windows to work. C# is mostly used to develop Windows desktop applications and games development.
If you’re interested in VR development, you should consider learning C#. C# is the recommended language for building 3D and 2D video games using the popular Unity game engine, which produces one-third of the top games on the market.
C# uses a syntax that’s similar to other C-derived languages like C++, so it’s easy if you already know some of them.
7. Ruby
Ruby is a scripting language used for web development. And beginners often start with Ruby because it’s one of the friendliest and most helpful user communities. Furthermore, it has an incredibly simple beautiful syntax, which allows a developer to do more with less code.
In addition to the active community and its straightforward syntax, Ruby is a great language to pick up thanks to its association with tech businesses. Twitter, Airbnb, Github, Shopify and other startups have built their websites using Ruby on Rails at some point.
Thanks to Ruby on Rails, getting a web application up-and-running takes less time than in other frameworks. That’s why startups love the language: it enables the startup mantra – “move fast and break things.”
Ruby is a dynamic language, which makes it flexible and great for prototypes, but hard to maintain at scale. As a Ruby app grows, the dynamic nature of the language obscures the source of code errors and eats up computing resources.
8. PHP
If you’re looking for a career in web development, PHP is a great start!
This server-side scripting language powers most of the websites today and has been a back-end tool for Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo and more.
PHP is very popular thanks to the role it plays in the WordPress content management system, which makes website development accessible to everyone.
Websites use PHP for collecting and verifying data, creating cookies, and displaying dynamic content and images.
PHP offers several frameworks, such as Laravel and Drupal, which help developers build applications faster and make them more robust, scalable and secure.
9. Rust
Even though Rust is a relatively new programming language, it has been voted as the most loved programming language by a stack overflow developer survey for three following years.
Rust is a similar language to C++ and has almost the same syntactic components.
However, Rust saves much more memory than C++ during runtime.
Rust is great for developing system solutions that require concurrency and aims at solving common safety issues. It prevents programs from accessing parts of memory that they shouldn’t, which can cause unexpected behaviour and system crashes.
Rust is a bit more difficult to master than other beginner languages, Rust programming skills are likely to pay off since the language’s popularity will only continue to rise.
10. Kotlin
Kotlin is one of the latest programming languages that’s very popular right from its initial days. But even though it is relatively new, it is already used in production by large companies like Amazon Web Services, Pinterest, Coursera, Netflix, and Uber.
Kotlin is an open-source, statically-typed programming language that supports object-oriented and functional programming. The best thing about Kotlin is that is 100% interoperable with Java. This means that you don’t have to adopt Kotlin all at once. You can have projects with both Koltin and Java code.
And even Google recommends Kotlin to developers who don’t want to build their Android apps with Java.
