I see this question coming up all the time:
What are the best programming languages that all developers should learn?
I have tried in the past in the argue that there is in fact not such a thing, but many good options in general, and more than one good options for you in particular, depending on what your context is.
I have to admit that I failed to convince anyone.
People still really would love to know what is the best programming language that all people should learn. And that makes sense. Honestly if there was a right answer, I would also love to know it.
The challenge
It might be much easier for you though to answer the reverse question:
What is the worst programming language that nobody should ever learn?
Is it Java, JavaScript, C#, CoffeeScript, Objective C, Perl, PHP, Cobol, Erlang, Brainfuck, F#, ...?
Please pick the one you think that it definitely never makes sense to learn it.
And me or my smart readers will play the role of the devil advocate that find a good scenario you when it actually would make sense to learn this useless language.
RULES: be polite. Insulting other developers community is not right.
Update: challenge results
The evil advocate was on a good streak to defend the case to defend BrainFuck, Python, Cobol, CoffeeScript, etc...
But then readers began to be always more astute and @daveford nailed it.
So this is the accepted answer.
The worst programming language to learn is the language that you have no motivation or desire to learn. It will be a miserable experience causing you to dislike the time it takes and the language.
Where to Go From There
Pick something that sounds like a sane choice for you and iterate from there. Relax the fuck out from the impossible idea to find the "correct" solution.
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Latest comments (57)
literally brainfuck, it's confusing on a whole new level, you have to like a saga to write hello world
C++
At first it looks all nice and feature full and easier than C but it ends up having a lot of quirks.
As junior at least I wouldn't recommend and I feel there's a lot of other very nice complied langages nowadays.
I think this old piece says it all still being relevant :) PHP a fractal of bad design
This is also a favorite of mine.
But in fact there are really good reasons to learn PHP.
Wikipedia is built on it for example.
Wouldn't you accept the quirks of PHP if you had the opportunity to work on such a great project but it had to be in PHP?
Tough call, but I don't think I would :) There are so many other great (OSS) projects that doesn't use PHP...
I am ready to bet that working on 99.9% of those open-source projects won't have the same positive impact than making Wikipedia 1% better.
I would choose Wikipedia.
you are right about the positive impact for sure, but for me it would just bring too much misery working with technology i really don't enjoy. :) If they'd ever need skills I have, I'll be happy to help :)
Maybe it's time for wikipedia to become more technology agnostic. Think more in line of a microservice architecture. At first glance it looks pretty monolithic
I mean, I guess that the pay is pretty good at Wikipedia, no? So you could work on the impactful things during 3-4 days a week, and on the interesting tech things for the rest of the week.
And also once you are there you are smart, so will find smart ways to improve their architecture, nothing is fixed in stone.
I spent the last 90 years mastering whitespace but then whenever I choose to use it in whiteboard interviews I don't seem to make the cut.
Jacquard punched cards. I could be wrong, but I think the state of the art in textile manufacturing has progressed.
Think they're talking about potential indentation errors!
Which aren't a problem if your text editor was made in the last 40 years.
Probably HolyC. It has only been used to create one "real world" application, and that was an OS whose creator sadly passed away and isn't really used for anything besides novelty. It's impressive in that a single person created a language and OS from scratch, but also it's not worth learning where there are hundreds of other languages you could learn.
LOLCode, probably.
BASIC, it's good for kids learning the basics but not practical in todays computing.
Objective-J,?
I've never met anyone with anything good to say about MUMPS.
The worst programming language to learn is the language that you have no motivation or desire to learn. It will be a miserable experience causing you to dislike the time it takes and the language.
This is canon!
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