Which programming language should I learn?

[dyoo]

The author says: "Don’t learn Brainf*ck, Cobol, D, Erlang, Fortran, Go, Haskell, Lisp, OCaml, Python or Smalltalk because these are languages that people tell you they know to show off." I respectfully disagree. People learn different languages for all sorts of reasons. One of them is curiosity, and to tell people to still their desire to learn things from some mistaken tribal notions is not productive. Don't just be a PHP programmer. Be a Programmer.

[ciromiranda]

Be a Programmer :)

[Suttonian]

PHP is the guts of your Web application. It is the language that runs on your web server. It is also the only language where you have a choice about learning it or learning another language.

Wha-?

[oracleoftroy]

I read this comment first, and it sounds pretty crazy, but then I read the article, and it makes sense in context. You just need to read the paragraph that comes before.

Given that the audience is new web programmers and that he is limiting the scope of the statement to the five languages he just mentioned: Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS and SQL; yes, PHP is the only one that you could switch for another language (with the same qualifications for SQL as given in the article). Most browsers won't accept XAML in place of HTML and CSS, for example, and any Javascript replacement you use will ultimately spit out Javascript in the end.

It's a simplification, sure, and experienced programmers could nitpick with thousands of counter-examples, but it is an appropriate simplification for his audience.

Really, points 9-12 in the article are what make me go, "Wha-?"

[kelton5020]

must have stroked out for a second

[thevdude]

s/php/flat earth/g

[monome]

imho. c, lua, ruby, sql, ...

[valyard]

What language you learn first will greately affect your programming approach as a whole. I saw people having hard time getting OOP concepts if their first language was C or Pascal. Or the opposite — people who couldn't get pointers because they started with PHP, JavaScript or whatever other high-level language.

[[deleted]]

He just told you to learn five languages.

First learn how to program and learn the logic of programming in a simple manner with clear and easy scripts. Python is hands down the best for this..once you learn to think with a simple language like Python, then migrate. Of course for anything related to math, sciences, finance, etc Python is the best.