Best Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage to Learn in 2016

• Re­port rights in­fringe­ment
• pub­lished: 09 Dec 2015
• views: 3258

I want to know the best pro­gram­ming lan­guage to learn in 2016. I know it won’t be Ob­jec­tive C, which was re­placed by Swift in 2014 or 2015. Should I learn Swift? If you want to pro­gram for Apple, sure. I don’t want to just pro­gram for Apple. Learn HTML5. HTML is the basic lan­guage any­one should know to do any­thing with web­sites. HTML5 is a lit­tle more ad­vanced, with cas­cad­ing style sheets, em­bed­ded video that re­places Adobe Flash and map and sketch el­e­ments. So I spend an­oth­er long week­end learn­ing the new ver­sion. The other thing you need to learn is JavaScript, since HTML5 stan­dards call for that to cre­ate in­ter­ac­tive scripts. I know you can embed JavaScript in the HTML5 pages so it can run small pro­grams with­out hav­ing to ac­cess a serv­er once the web­page has load­ed. And you can still use it to call scripts in other lan­guages on the serv­er like PHP and Python. PHP is one of the dom­i­nant serv­er-side lan­guages. So is Python, and Python de­vel­op­ers made 25K more per year than PHP de­vel­op­ers in 2014. Okay, I’ll admit all the dol­lar signs are help­ing make that a good op­tion. R is well re­im­bursed too. How­ev­er, it is used in bioin­for­mat­ics and big data ap­pli­ca­tions, so you al­most have to have a math de­gree or doc­tor­ate in life sci­ences to use it. Then we’re back to Python, since its de­vel­op­ers are in the top ten best paid pro­gram­mers’ lists as well as top ten tech­nol­o­gy in­dus­try stan­dards. What else could I make a de­cent liv­ing at? C++. That’s older than I am. C is older than you are, but C++ is big in the gam­ing in­dus­try. You’re right; gamers spend more on games than any­one al­to­geth­er pays for movies, theme parks and a cou­ple other en­ter­tain­ment cat­e­gories. You do risk get­ting burned out on tight sched­ules to get a game out in time, but you’re well paid for it. That’s a given in any pro­gram­ming job un­less it is using non-cod­ing apps to put out lit­tle kids’ games. Jobs Trac­tor says there’s a lot of de­mand for C# pro­gram­mers, and a de­cent pay rate. Given the F# and other ver­sions of the dot-net ar­chi­tec­ture, there are newer things that may re­place it later. If you want to be well paid and not work on stuff that could be done by kids learn­ing JavaScript in­stead of French in mid­dle school, learn SQL. The database lan­guage? The sheer chal­lenge of it guar­an­tees you’re well paid, and that even the peo­ple who want the re­ports will want some­one else to do it.