Best programming language
Twenty programming languages, from 1950s pioneers to modern favourites. Which one would you pick?
Tier list by PairTier · 20 items
- C — Created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, the language of Unix and countless systems.
- C++ — Bjarne Stroustrup's extension of C with classes and templates, used for games and high-performance software.
- Java — Sun Microsystems' 1995 language that promised 'write once, run anywhere' on its virtual machine.
- Python — Guido van Rossum's readable general-purpose language, huge in data science and scripting.
- JavaScript — Created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995, the programming language of the web browser.
- TypeScript — Microsoft's superset of JavaScript that adds static types, released in 2012.
- C# — Microsoft's object-oriented language for the .NET platform, led by Anders Hejlsberg.
- Go — Language designed at Google and released in 2009, prized for simplicity and concurrency.
- Rust — Systems language that began at Mozilla, offering memory safety without a garbage collector.
- Ruby — Yukihiro Matsumoto's expressive language, popularized by the Ruby on Rails web framework.
- PHP — Server-side scripting language started by Rasmus Lerdorf that powers much of the web.
- Swift — Apple's modern language for iOS and macOS apps, introduced in 2014.
- Kotlin — JetBrains' concise JVM language, preferred by Google for Android development.
- Haskell — Purely functional language with lazy evaluation, named after logician Haskell Curry.
- Lisp — John McCarthy's 1958 language built on lists, a long-time favourite in AI research.
- Fortran — IBM's 1950s language for scientific computing, developed by a team led by John Backus.
- COBOL — Business-oriented language from 1959 that still runs many banking systems.
- SQL — Declarative language for querying and managing relational databases.
- Perl — Larry Wall's text-processing language, once known as the duct tape of the internet.
- Pascal — Niklaus Wirth's structured language from 1970, widely used in teaching programming.