Old, Obsolete or Overlooked
“What or which is the best programming language?” I believe is an age long question. People everywhere want to know which language will be worth their while; the language that will make them most employable and visible.
If I was asked this question a couple of weeks back, I would have instead answered the question, “What programming language did I think was the worst?”. The answer would have been VB.NET. But today, if I were to answer that same question, my answer would be “None”. No one programming language is better than the other.
Each programming language is more suited for performing certain functions than others that is why they may be more popular than others.
Back to my VB.NET story, I have been writing VB.NET and C# consistently for the last couple of years and for a while, I believed that VB.NET was quite limiting and I felt so dissatisfied until recently.
VB.NET is one of the three part .NET frameworks owned by Microsoft. The others are C#.NET and F#.NET. A lot of people are more conversant with #C than the other two languages. One of the reasons why I felt other languages were better than VB.NET was due to the things I judged to be limitations when they were actually mostly architectural issues. So, I did some research on the language and I found out that VB.NET is just as capable as the other two languages in creating great applications. In fact, VB.NET might just be the best thing for a novice .NET developer to learn first due to its simple and relatable syntax. VB.NET is quite readable owing to the fact that its syntax is mostly basic English.
For each of the other languages we have: Go, Python, Java, Kotlin, R, Angular, React, PHP, COBOL, JavaScript, Node.js, etc. they all have what functions they are better suited for. However, due to the demand in certain types of functionality, some languages might be more common than the others. Python is one of the most popular languages today which is due to its multifunctional ability. Python can be employed in web development, app development and data science which makes it to be in very high demand when compared to others. Another example of a language that has gained high traction due to demand is JavaScript. With increasing popularity of the MEAN stack which is an offshoot of JavaScript, there is more demand for the language.
While for enterprise solutions, most people depend on the .NET frameworks and Java because of their robustness and continuous evolution. Also, like all programming languages, there is continuous improvement carried out in order to increase functionality, make it faster and easier to use. An example is the development of the .NET CORE framework which is cross-platforms enabled. In the past, the major set back of the .NET frameworks was the fact that it was not cross functional — everything had to reside in some form of Microsoft enabled platform but with .NET CORE, you can develop a portion of your code using the .NET framework and plug it into other kinds of framework.
Another example of this innovation is the Java spring boot, which is a Java-based framework.
While a case can be made for the versatility of a programming language, it is not enough to claim that a language is not good enough to be learnt or obsolete unless support for it has been discontinued.
Some languages might appear to be overlooked due to less demand for them but languages that seem old are safe to work with also as there is always continued improvement on them in order to make them more competitive in the market.
Therefore, we can say that some languages are in higher demand than others but we cannot say that one language is better than the others because functionality determines demand.
So, if you want to learn a programming language, just do a research on which meets your needs the most and go after it.
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on Twitter: @bammieyour
LinkedIn: Olufunmbi Adeosun