If you are a college student looking for suggestions of programming languages to learn,or a working professional or a passionate person about programming,or even no one of these,you should still learn programming languages.
According to Steve Jobs: “Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”
But, the question which always puts you in a dilemma is which language should I learn???
To be honest,there is no straight and exact answer to this question.There are so many languages currently in the market and in demand which can pay you well. Every language has its own features,pros and cons.But, to make it easier for you according to your reason for learning programming, we have brought to you the best programming languages you can learn.
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First and foremost, if you are a college student or beginner just starting your journey of learning programming and want to have a solid base which can help you master programming,then you should start with C Programming Language.
Python
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If you want to opt for something easy,then you can go for the Python language.
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It is considered a simple,free, general purpose, high level, interpreted, interactive and object-oriented programming language. It uses English keywords frequently and it has fewer syntactic constructions than other languages.
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Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its notable use of significant whitespaces.
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One of the most versatile programming languages, even if you don’t have much experience in programming you can learn it easily. It is suitable for people having no experience in programming as well as professionals.
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The average salary of a Python developer of beginner level can be more than 40k.
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Who can learn? |
Beginners to advanced |
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Difficulty |
Easy |
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Prior skills required |
None |
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Uses |
Web development,game development,software development,MA&AI,CAD Applications,Desktop GUI,etc. |
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Popularity |
Python ranks 1st in the TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity |
Javascript
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If you want to start your programming journey from frontend and slowly move to fullstack then you can opt for Javascript.
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JavaScript was originally used for web browser development only to add interaction to customer facing sites like animation etc, but now it is used for server-side website deployments and non-web browser applications as well.
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Javascript is often confused with java language but both are different languages although there are few similarities in it.
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Most of the popular websites and apps are relying on javascript such as Instagram,Facebook, Twitter, Gmail etc.
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Who can learn? |
Beginners to advanced |
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Difficulty |
Easy |
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Prior skills required |
HTML,CSS |
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Uses |
Web development,game development,software development etc. |
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Popularity |
It currently stands as most commonly used language in the world |
Kotlin
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Kotlin was developed by JetBrains in 2011, however the very first official version was released in 2016.
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It is interoperable with functional programming languages and Java.
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Who can learn? |
Intermediate to advanced |
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Difficulty |
Medium |
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Prior skills required |
Preferably java |
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Uses |
Web development,Android app development,Desktop application development etc. |
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Popularity |
Popular for android applications |
Java
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Java is a general purpose,object oriented,platform independent programming language which follows the WORA(Write Once Run Anywhere) concept which means it can be written on any platform and run on any platform.
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Java frameworks such as hibernate,spring are popular among professionals with a large number of open source libraries.
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Java offers APIs for different activities like Database connection, networking, XML parsing, utilities, etc.
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It is a bit complex but still beginner friendly.
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Who can learn? |
Beginner to advanced |
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Difficulty |
Medium |
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Prior skills required |
Preferably OOPs |
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Uses |
Web development,Android app development,Desktop application development and Big Data etc. |
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Popularity |
One of the most popular language |
Swift
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Swift supports almost everything in the programming language Objective-C, that is C with object concept.
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Objective-C was the language used by NEXT(Later bought by Apple) at that time.
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So Apple had their own framework called COCOA which combined with Objective-C was a great language.
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Later Apple started using Swift so it supports almost Objective-C.
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Swift is an open source language and easy to use.
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Apps like linked in use swift.
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Very fast as compared to objective-C and Python.
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Who can learn? |
Beginner to advanced |
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Difficulty |
Easy to Medium |
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Prior skills required |
Specifically None |
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Uses |
Used for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. |
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Popularity |
One of the most popular language |
R
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R is a comprehensive statistical analysis language used for statistics and graphical programming that you can use to clean, analyze, and graph your data and which is easy to code.
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R has excellent built-in libraries and framework to develop powerful machine learning algorithms.
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Learning R can be a great career choice because as of now there are less people having expertise in it.
It is a cross platform language having OOPs features.
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Who can learn? |
Intermediate to advanced |
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Difficulty |
Moderate |
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Prior skills required |
Specifically None,People with good mathematical skills |
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Uses |
Majorly used in data analysis, financial domains, and telecom sectors. |
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Popularity |
R ranks 11th in the TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity |
To conclude everything,there are hundreds of languages but there are very few who make it to the list. Every language has its own properties and can be preferred depending upon which field you need to work on and how easy you want it to be.So, choose an area where you want to work, pick up the suitable programming language and give your best to learn it. No matter which language you pick up,code should always be clean and understandable by anyone who is going to maintain it.
Ending with a quote of Rick Osborne who says:
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."