Lots of conversations around programming languages ​​often result in, unfortunately, falling into declaring one programming language better than another. There will probably never be a single programming language to rule them out and more importantly it shouldn’t be. Different types of programming languages ​​are needed to meet the different needs of software. As a professional developer you will never stop after mastering a programming language, you need to be programmable just like the computers you work with.


In fact, there is no ‘best tool’, only the best tool for the job. The same can be said for programming languages. Often the best programming language for work is not only a factor in the technical competence of a language, but also the nature of the software, the goals of the software and even how the software will be developed and deployed. A perfect example of this can be found in the way a relatively unknown service code called OwnCloud was coded. It is an open source project aimed at giving people control over their own data. The software includes apps for cloud storage, calendars, music streaming, photo storage and more. It can also sync local files to the cloud like Dropbox. After all, you can host it wherever you want, so you control where your data goes.

The developers of OnCloud opted for PHP for the project despite having better and simpler language available. Despite PHP’s poor reputation, there were some very good reasons for their choice. PHP is often supported by the cheapest hosting provider and the cheapest of the packages. This is great for OnCloud’s goals of reaching a wide audience. It’s also great for attracting developers, as it’s a popular language known to many developers and easy for others to learn.


The iPhone is such a bad app platform that if you want to reach Indian farmers, sometimes a non-technical context is needed for technical decisions. It is important to look for the minimum common denominator for a software in terms of popularity; In the case of OwnCloud it was PHP. Ruby or Python or even node sorting will be the opposite of the goal of the software.

The key is to find the best language for the job. In some cases it has been chosen for you – or strongly recommended – as in the case of Java for Android, or Objective-C / Swift for iOS. In other cases it is about the limitations of the target environment, for example embedded system programming is often done in C and assembly. For web development, there are some restrictions that prevent you from using C / C ++, but this is usually a bad idea, you’ll be better off with Python, Ruby, JavaScript or even PHP and Java. For scientific computing, you’ll probably want MATLAB, R, or Python; Here MATLAB and R were designed for this purpose, but it is effective because of the abundance of scientific computing packages available for Python. In the case of Facebook they started with PHP, and once they were far away, instead of re-coding everything, they decided to improve the PHP ecosystem with PHP compiler, and now a new language called PHP based hack.

Through this article we want to give you a brief overview of today’s most popular programming languages. Below we present detailed guidelines on both old and newer languages ​​for C, C ++ and Java and newer ones like Rust and Swift. We have the language covering most of the popular instances listed so far. For each language we will explore how it came to be, its power and significance, popular and common tools for the language and we will mention a few places where you can learn more about them. We also include small code samples for each language, one of the regular ‘Hello World’ programs, and a simple insertion sorting algorithm where possible, so you can get a richer taste of the language.

So with that in mind, what do we expect with all the programming languages ​​covered in this article? Of course explore them all! It is important not to confine oneself to a single instance, functional or essential, static or dynamic, explained or compiled. They all have strengths and weaknesses that make them shine in their own domain. Interesting fact: there is no such thing as explained language or compiled language; Whether a language is interpreted or compiled depends on the nature of its implementation. It is possible to compile Python or Ruby and also to explain C / C ++

It is good to have a choice, but it is more important to be flexible. Whatever your feelings about a given language, it may have the power to make it the most suitable for the software you are developing, even if that power is simply its popularity. With that note, let’s take a quick look at some of today’s most popular programming languages ​​so you can make an assessment for yourself: