This is a personal opinion Blog based on my experiences in the Information Technology space as a programmer and a leader of programmers for over 20 years. Your experience and opinion may be different, if so, write a blog expressing your opinion, I would love to read it.

I get asked this question a lot, well, maybe not a lot, maybe a couple of times during the year or maybe never, who keeps count. Anyways, at some time in the past I was once asked, “what is the best programming language to learn?”. My usual response to this question is, learn the language that best fits what you are doing. Easy to say but in my personal opinion programming languages are like tools in your tool box. You don’t use a hammer to screw in a wood screw and you don’t use C++ to make a webpage.

With that being said, I also answer back, learn to program, don’t learn a language. In my personal opinion, programming is a skill, learning a programming language is memorization and repetition. This is not to say that there are programmers out there that have focused on one language and have become incredible programmers but in my experience learning languages instead of learning to program limits your growth and limits your earning potential.

In my career I have hired many programmers and have been stunned by how programmers focus only on the language they know. An example of this is when a C# (a popular general purpose Microsoft language) programmer walks away from a project because it was in Java (a popular general purpose open source language). This makes no sense to me, if you know how to program, the language doesn’t really matter all you need to know is what tools (ide, compiler, libraries, packet managers, etc…) and language stylistic quirks. For C# and Java, they are very similar and are, in my opinion, easy to switch between practically on the fly.

This is easy for me to say since I have been programming for more than 20 years and have several University degrees focused on programming and have used just about every mainstream programming language since the mid 90’s, and yes, I do remember punch cards…

Many times I have taken on a project with no knowledge what so ever of the language and technologies involved and been able to complete the project on time, on budget and in scope (more about this when I write a blog about Project Management)..

But all this does nothing to assist the new programmer with a head full of knowledge and a project to finish.

So, to answer the question, what programming language should I learn I say, learn them all by learning to program then select the best tool for the job that will allow you to complete the project.

The above is all my take on programming, to get a better take on it, I highly recommend Top 20 Best Programming Languages To Learn in 2023 | Simplilearn and if you want to learn languages and technologies, go to W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.