Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2023

Everyone and their mother wants to learn how to code nowadays. Well maybe not my mother, I think she’s content to maintain her not-so-tech-savvy status quo (said with much love). But whether it’s for job opportunities, personal projects or plain curiosity, the sentiment remains that more and more people are interested in learning computer programming.

The question everyone has: what programming language should you learn? What’s the best language for beginners? What language will give you the most 'bang for your buck' so to speak?

The answer is … it depends. Helpful, I know.

It depends because there are so many different programming languages out there, and some are better suited for some applications and purposes than others. So, the programming language that would be the best use of your time depends on what your goals are.

That being said, I’ll go over what I think some of the best starting points in a development journey would be.

Best overall language

If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you probably already knew I was going to start with this one. I think Python is an excellent place to start when learning to code and is probably the best place to start if you are looking to build general coding knowledge. It’s the first language I learned, so maybe I’m a bit biased but I feel like the stats back me up here.

One of the best tools to have in your development tool box, Python is designed to be very readable and easy to understand, making it perfect for beginners to pick up and build a strong coding foundation.

But don’t let simple syntax fool you into thinking you can’t do as much with this language. Python is highly versatile and a powerful object-oriented programming language. It’s widely popular across the industry and can be used for everything from simple programs to data science to artificial intelligence and machine learning, and literally everything in between.

It’s still a fast growing language and being as intuitive and useful as it is, learning Python definitely would be a good use of your time.

Best for Web Development

You probably think of JavaScript when you think of web development. Or maybe you don’t and that’s why you’re reading this article. Either way, JavaScript is a very popular language for web development.

However, and this might be slightly controversial, if web development is your goal I’d say that the best language to learn would be TypeScript. But you honestly can’t go wrong with either, and they are extremely similar.

Typescript is considered a superset of JavaScript, which basically means that TypeScript is JavaScript but *more*. They share a lot of syntax and TypeScript is compiled down to JavaScript before runtime so by learning TypeScript you inadvertently also learn JavaScript. TypeScript takes the cake though because it’s easier to read and maintain. It’s statically typed and more modular through implementation of classes and interfaces. TypeScript also works nicely with some of the most popular web development frameworks and libraries like Angular and React.

I’ll add a few caveats here.

Some might find it easier to wrap their minds around the concepts in JavaScript before moving on to TypeScript, but since a majority of the concepts are used in both, I believe you can learn both synchronously and you’ll end up using TypeScript more anyway.

Also, I don’t personally think that either TypeScript OR JavaScript should be your very first programming language. These can get complex pretty quickly and I think it’s best to at least familiarize yourself with some basic coding concepts before adventuring into anything else *cough python cough*.

Best for Data Processing and Analytics

Not to sound like a broken record here, but my answer to this one is yet again Python.

You’ve heard me say it all before; Python is intuitive, powerful, object-oriented, and can be used for a wide range of applications. There are also lots of helpful and impressive data analysis libraries built right into Python that make it one of the most widely used languages in data science.

However, I’d be remiss not to mention R. It's another easy to learn language that's great for statistical analysis and can handle complex calculations and data visualization. There are also many libraries available for creating data models. It’s heavier on the statistics side of things than Python, giving it a larger learning curve, but if strong data analytics is your aim, R is a great option.

Bonus Best Language

Coming in with my award for a bonus best language to learn is Go, also called Golang. While it’s become pretty widely used, it’s not one of the most popular languages out there…yet.

Go is an open-sourced language created by Google with a very active dev community and takes the best of other languages and combines them into one. I would describe Go as Python and C/C++ mashed together.

Structurally, Go is similar to languages like C/C++ but with a lot of improved control over memory allocation. You can even run processes concurrently, making your programs fast and efficient. Unlike C/C++ which has complex syntax and data typing, Go is simple, extremely readable and easy to learn like Python.

Go is a multi-purpose language so you can use it for anything, but one of the things it was specifically designed for is cloud computing. Go is supported by the big cloud based platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Kubernetes with libraries that seamlessly incorporate cloud services into your programs. With the way everything is moving to the cloud, Go is a very valuable language to know and I believe it will only continue to grow in popularity.

Conclusion

In summary, there’s no one language to rule them all. Each language has pros and cons and different use cases. Developers typically specialize in one or two languages but it’s good to dabble in others sometimes. Try some on for size to see what's out there and what will best suit your needs.

One thing I like to tell anyone who is learning coding is that programming is mostly just a way of thinking. The core concepts of computer science hold true across languages. Your first language will probably be the hardest to learn because it’s entirely new, so be patient with it and yourself. Once you learn to think through a problem like a programmer, languages are mostly just syntax and you’ll be able to pick up new ones in no time.