RE: 5 Most Popular Programming Languages for Newbie Programmers
In my opinion, if you want to learn programming, start with Python! It is both powerful, (relatively) intuitive and easy to learn. Unlike most other languages, it was designed for making it easy to read and understand the code - which is an essential feature both when learning a new language and when maintaining existing applications.
C is still useful and will remain useful for many decades in the future ... but I would not recommend anyone to start with C as the first language. C is a relatively low-level language - if one wants to make an application that is fast and light-weight then C is the right choice. If one wants to produce something that works in relatively short development time, then C is a bad choice.
PHP is popular because it got a quite dominant position for server-side web programming at one point. It got a certain network-effect ... but it's not a very good language. I believe PHP usage is in a decline, I don't see any future for PHP.
JavaScript is the standard for browser-side programming, I don't know a lot of JS, but I think it's not a very elegant or easy language. However, it's very useful to master JS when building web applications or even simple web pages. JS has even become popular for backend applications (Node.js).
I believe the same can be said about Java; not a very elegant nor easy language, but highly useful. It was the go-to-language for browser applets - nowadays it's almost never used in the browser, but quite some web applications are using Java on the backend. I believe Java is mostly useful for building cellphone apps nowadays.
Python is simple, easy to learn and use though in my opinion not as easy as learning and using JavaScript, you just have to love JavaScript, being a multipurpose language I think any one interested in programming should learn it first combined with HTML/CSS before any other language.
Java would have been a better JavaScript competitor had it been it was relatively easy to use, at the same time Java is also great and very useful though it's getting less use lately same as PHP whereas PHP is still very widely popular in many developer circles.
JavaScript and PHP are both easy to use though JavaScript still takes the lead in the comparison.
C is the god.
Nice points you have made here