For a career in (or just a really firm working grasp of) IT, learning a programming language is a rite of passage. For the first generation – now veterans of the industry – COBOL was a standard. Those who gained their stripes at college in the nineties may well have cut their teeth on Pascal or Visual Basic. Depending on when and under whose tutelage the developer gained his or her knowledge, he or she will emerge with their own favorite programming language.
The ever-changing roll-call of best-loved languages results from a number of factors. These range from the demands of employers to recruit developers conversant with a specific language to the language that newly emerging applications are written in.
Visual Basic once occupied pride of place, but in recent years has been outstripped by JAVA and PHP, frequently ranking in the top three, along with one of the C family of languages.
Deciding which languages to learn may depend on certain characteristics. A technology specialist intent on developing his or her language base will examine whether they need functional, procedural, scripting or object-oriented languages for their work.
Generally, a thorough knowledge of three programming languages is considered an adequate professional grounding. Some employers favor more, on the basis that the candidate with more such knowledge will be better at thinking laterally.
For web development, practitioners in the field recommend the language Django, while PHP is an obvious language to master; it is the language in which Wikipedia, for instance, is written. Game design is a challenging and often lucrative division of the IT industry and for this field the most common language is C++.
The topic keeps techies (or ‘coders’ as language experts like to call themselves) endlessly occupied on internet forums. Complete newcomers are often advised to try Python or Ruby. The watchword for budding developers in 2011 is to learn Android and thus be equipped with the latest in mobile phone coding.