How to Choose a Programming Language

How to Choose a Programming Language

By Simon Sauter

Preface

One of the most asked questions in the Sololearn Q&A forum is "What programming language should I learn?" In this document I explain first why that is not a good way to approach the issue and then give some tips on how to choose a programming language. What I will not do is recommend any programming languages. The reason for that should become clear soon.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Unfortunately, a lot of people go about choosing a programming language in a very bad way. For that reason before talking about how to choose a language it is necessary to talk about how not to choose a language.

Mistake 1: Asking in the Q&A Forum What Language to Learn

There are many reasons why you shouldn't ask in the Q&A forum what language you should learn. A formal one is that asking general, open-ended, and opinion based questions is strongly discouraged and such questions are regularly deleted by moderators. Another reason is that the question has been asked and answered many, many times before. There is simply no point in asking the question again. In cases like that you should normally use the search function and read the existing information.

But maybe the most important reason is that the answers you'll get in the Q&A forum are bound to be inferior to the information you can easily find on your own elsewhere. If you look at past discussions of the issue on the forum you'll notice that most of the answers given are along the lines of "learn x, it's fun", "learn y, it's easy", "learn z, it's powerful". Even if x is fun, y is easy, and z is powerful this is bad advice. No rational person would ever make a decision based on so little information. More importantly these answers don't take into account your personal situation. You'll also find more elaborate answers like "if you want to do a learn x, if you want to do b learn y, if you want to do c learn z". While this is much better advice it is still foolish to base a decision on them. At best such an answer can be a point of reference for more research on the issue. It is simply not possible to cover all relevant points in a Q&A post. Any answer that fits inside a Q&A post is bad advice. That’s why not only people should not ask the question in Q&A they should also not answer the question there.

It's like walking into a hardware store and asking people what the best tool is. One will recommend a hammer, "because it's easy to use", another a screwdriver "because you need it practically everywhere", somewhere in the back an old guy will mumble something like "back in my day we had this great tool, we built everything with it, but you young people probably haven't even heard of it". And of course there will be someone who recommends finger paints "because you can make things pretty with them". At this point the others will point out that finger paints aren't a tool.

Mistake 2: Choosing a Language Because it's Easy to Learn

A popular -- and worse -- variation of the question "what programming language should I learn?" is "what programming language is easy to learn?" I'm not even going to address why you should not choose a language because it's easy to learn. Just don't do it.

Mistake 3: Asking Which Language is Fastest to Learn

If you're asking this question, I have only one advice for you: Leave it be, you'll never be a programmer, so don't waste your time.

How to Choose a Programming Language

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Making a Decision

First you have to get clear on why you want to learn programming and what goal beyond learning it is you want to pursue. Therefore, before you make a decision, better yet, before you start researching the issue, you should ask yourself several questions. Here are some of them:

Do you want to learn programming as a hobby, for your degree or for your career?
What kind of programming are you interested in? E.g.
- General
- Web Development
- Scientific Computing
- Data Analysis / Data Science
- Game programming
What platform do you want to program for? E.g.
- Cross-platform
- Desktop (Windows, MacOS, Linux)
- Mobile (Android, iOS)

Narrowing Down Options

When you are clear about your situation it is time to research the options. For this you should make extensive use of internet search engines like google, bing, yandex, etc. The first thing to get clear about is which languages fit the kind of programming you're interested in and the platform you want to program for.

If you want to learn programming for your degree the best starting point is to take a look at the websites of your school (if you've already chosen one) or of several schools (if you haven't). Here you can find information about which languages are required for the kind of degree you want to pursue, what kind of courses will be available, etc.

If you want to learn programming for your career you should take a look at the demand for different languages. There are several places where you can find relevant information. There are surveys of employers where they are asked about which programming languages they use and which languages a programmer should know if they want to work for them. A less systematic way of approaching the question is to take a look at job advertisements. There are a lot of internet platforms you can take a look at for this. Some of these also offer statistics about the number of job listings for particular languages. While demand should play some part in your decision it should definitely not be the deciding factor. Of course if you want to pursue a career in programming you'll want to learn a language which is at least in some demand. But it is just as important, if not more so, that you choose a language that fits your interests.

If you want to program as a hobby you don't need to bother about what other people want, so issues like demand are irrelevant. Nevertheless even in this case it is not completely irrelevant how popular languages are. The less popular a language is the harder it is to find good resources for learning and people that you can ask for help or discuss issues with.

Researching Options

At this point you should have a list of languages you are considering. Now it is time to get more information about these languages. As an absolute minimum take a look at some general information about each of the languages you're considering. This could be a Wikipedia article, a blog post, information on the language's web page, etc.

Now that you have a basic idea of the programming languages you're considering you should take a look at comparisons of languages. You'll find a lot of blog posts on this. You should take a look at several. Different people have different preferences. Some emphasize how easy or hard it is to learn a language, others believe it is more important how powerful a language is. It is important to get information from people who know several languages and can therefore point out the advantages and disadvantages of them.

Closing Remarks

You may find all this onerous and boring. But the field of programming is just far too vast to make a good decision without solid research. And trust me, if you're not willing to put in this work, you won't be willing to put in the work necessary to learn programming either. Fortunately all the information is readily available. Take your time, consider your options, and when you're ready, start your first course. If you end up not liking it or just being curious about other languages just try another one.

Links to Some (Potentially) Helpful Resources

You really should do your own web searches and research, but here are some links that can start you off.

General Advice on Choosing a Programming Language

treehouse: How to Choose a Programming Language

Some Articles Making Recommendations

This selection should not be seen as an endorsement of the recommendations made in these articles.

geeksforgeeks: Which Programming Language Should I Choose as a Beginner?

geeksforgeeks: Which Programming Language to Choose?

freecodecamp: What Programming Language Should I Learn First in 2021? [Solved]

codecademy: What programming language should you learn first?

Quick Overviews/Comparisons of Programming Languages

Northeastern University: The 10 Most Popular Programming Languages to Learn in 2021

Mikke Goes Coding: 14 Popular Programming Languages and Their Uses Explained

ComputerScience.org: Computer Programming Languages

Roadmaps for Some Specialisations

There are a lot of choices for general programming. But for some specialisations like web development, the options are limited and at least the first steps are pretty clear.

w3schools: Web Development Roadmaps

freecodecamp: How to Learn Web Development in 2021 - a Web Developer Roadmap

geeksforgeeks: Best Way to Become Android Developer – A Complete Roadmap

geeksforgeeks: How to Become Data Scientist – A Complete Roadmap

The Popularity Contest

Stack Overflow: Annual Developer Survey
Stack Overflow is a platform for Q&A on a lot of issues. It's programming related sections are maybe the most important programming Q&A. They run a yearly survey among developers with tens of thousands of respondents on all kinds of programming related questions like what language people are using, what IDEs they use, what system they have, and many more.

Kaggle: State of Data Science and Machine Learning 2020
Kaggle is a major data science platform offering courses, data sets, an online programming environment, and a lot of data science competitions. They run a yearly survey among data scientists.

statista: Most used programming languages among developers worldwide, as of 2021
statista is a data and statistics platform with statistics and survey results on all kinds of issues.

TIOBE Index
A simple popularity index for programming languages based on internet searches.

PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language
A simple popularity index for programming languages based on internet searches.

Top Programming Languages 2021
A popularity index for programming languages based on metrics from multiple sources.

Burning Glass: Beyond Point and Click -- The Expanding Demand for Coding Skills
A statistical analysis of job postings for developers. A little dated -- it's from 2016.

Dice: JavaScript, Python, Java, and More Languages That Employers Want
A summary of a survey by HackerRank about the demand for programming languages. You can get the full report on HackerRank, but they want your data first.