There is no IDEAL language.
You use what your employer, your instructor, or your equipment requires.
If you don't have an employer or an instructor, and are wealthy enough to be idealistic... consider that you are in the minority, and the majority of us have to be pragmatic.
If you don't have an employer or an instructor and are not wealthy... be pragmatic and learn what you can that will get you what you want.
There are several categorizations of programming languages... I outlined it once since I had never seen it explained.
Based on what I read online it goes like this.
(Some languages mix aspects of 2 or more of these groupings.)
1: Imperative Programming
1.A: Procedural Programming
1.A.1: Structured
1.A.2: Object-Oriented (OOP)
1.A.3: Modular
1.A.4: Page Description
2: Declarative Programming
2.A: Query/Database Programming
2.B: Functional Programming
Languages that are Procedural and/or Structured
Fortran
ALGOL
Cobol
BASIC
Pascal
C
Visual Basic 6 and older
Visual FoxPro
Progress 4GL
There is no IDEAL language.
You use what your employer, your instructor, or your equipment requires.
If you don't have an employer or an instructor, and are wealthy enough to be idealistic... consider that you are in the minority, and the majority of us have to be pragmatic.
If you don't have an employer or an instructor and are not wealthy... be pragmatic and learn what you can that will get you what you want.
Languages that are Functional
Common Lisp
Clojure
Erlang
Haskell
F#
(And SOME non-Functional languages have Functional characteristics)
Languages that are Object-Oriented (OOP)
C++
Java
C#
Python
PHP
Javascript
Ruby
Perl
ObjectPascal
Objective-C
Dart
Swift
Scala
Page Description Languages
PostScript
PDF
Languages for Querying
SQL
Dbase / FoxPro
Progress