Choosing a Programming Language

Short answer: it matters less than starting

What actually differs between Python, C, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Rust and Go — and why the choice matters far less than most beginners think.
Foundations

Python is my language of choice. But in my opinion, choosing which language to start with is far less important than simply starting.

Moving between programming languages means learning new words, sure. It does not mean relearning how computers handle information. The logic underneath computer science is essentially a form of math, and concepts like multiplication and addition work just fine even if we change bases or change how we write them down.

An example of what actually changes

Python makes a lot of assumptions for you. If you want to store a number to use later, you tell it x = 5 and it runs without complaint. Python sees a whole number on its own and assumes it is an integer1. It handles the memory and the background categorisation for you.

C does not make the same assumptions. Put x = 5 into C and it breaks. C assumes nothing about what x is supposed to be, so it has no idea how much memory to give it. You need to say explicitly that x is an integer:

int x = 5;

And then it handles it no problem.

The logic of storing and manipulating data is the same in both cases. The language used to describe it changed. Learning the logic of computers is usually the hardest part for people, and transitioning to another language afterwards is nowhere near as difficult.

That said, the language you begin with often goes hand in hand with what you want to accomplish. Here is the honest version of the trade-offs.

The languages

Good

  • Industry standard for AI, machine learning, and data science
  • Excellent data handling and analysis (its packages run highly optimised C and Fortran underneath)
  • Very beginner-friendly
  • Makes lots of assumptions, so it handles memory for you
  • An enormous ecosystem of packages written by other people

Bad

  • Slow execution speed
  • Whitespace matters
  • Can hide its inner workings, which makes performance problems harder to debug
  • Makes lots of assumptions, so you have less manual control

Good

  • Unmatched processing speed and precise memory control
  • Runs on essentially every piece of hardware that exists
  • Industry standard for systems programming and hardware integration
  • C++ in particular is the standard for game development (Unreal Engine)

Bad

  • Complex syntax
  • You have to understand manual memory management
  • Assumes very little, so you build everything explicitly

Good

  • Extremely fast and efficient for heavy numerical arrays and complex math
  • Heavily used in scientific computing and supercomputing
  • Explicit control over memory handling
  • Decades of optimised math libraries to pull from

Bad

  • Very old
  • You need to understand memory handling explicitly
  • Not suited to general-purpose programming or modern user interfaces

Good

  • Industry standards for large corporate application development
  • Highly general-purpose — they power everything from mobile apps to heavy enterprise servers
  • Object-oriented, which scales well across large teams
  • C# is the language of Unity for game development

Bad

  • Verbose syntax that requires a lot of boilerplate
  • Slower startup times and higher memory overhead than C or C++

Good

  • Industry standard for web development
  • Runs natively in web browsers
  • Full-stack development is possible in one language, front-end and back-end
  • Massive industry presence and community
  • TypeScript adds strict typing rules that prevent messy errors in large projects

Bad

  • Large, complex dependency trees
  • Plain JavaScript is prone to runtime errors

Good

  • Industry standard for microservices and modern cloud infrastructure
  • Rust can be extremely fast, comparable to C, and guarantees memory safety
  • Go is designed to be easy to learn and handles thousands of simultaneous tasks effortlessly

Bad

  • Rust is notoriously difficult to learn
  • Go is extremely verbose, and lacks certain advanced features, so you end up writing repetitive code

So which one?

Do you want to work in data analysis or AI? Python.

Game development? C++ or C#.

Do you want to understand the ins and outs of how a computer handles information? C.

Do you want to hang with the old computational physicists and complain about how slow Python is? Fortran.

Full-stack or web development? JavaScript/TypeScript.

A phone app? Java.

Rust and Go are new enough that I honestly don’t know much about them, but if you want to dive into that territory, go for it.

And if you don’t know what you want to do yet, I will make it simple: start with Python. Then go to Lesson 1.

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Footnotes

  1. In math terms, an integer is a number with no decimal part — a whole number. It can be positive, negative, or zero.↩︎