Most popular programming language for Beginners

Most popular programming language for Beginners

I’ve tried to collect simple statistics from CodeAbbey users table. Currently it have 3121 users listed and filter allows to see how many of them prefer one language or another:

• 579 or 18.6% are using C++ or C (they are not distinguished)
• 219 or 7.0% are using C#
• 522 or 16.7% are using Java
• 168 or 5.4% are using JavaScript (which is not Java!)
• 41 or 1.3% are using PHP
• 10 or 0.3% are using VisualBasic
• 1039 or 33.3% are using Python

(in total they cover more than 82% - you can yourself experiment with filter to get more results)

So Python is the obvious leader!

Of course these stats could be somewhat imprecise (for example because not all languages are thought useful for problem solving - that is why PHP has so low percent - and Java has some advantage because some percent of users come here from java forum) - however the main idea is clear.

Python is nowadays very popular for beginners because:

• it allows to dive into programming easily, without prior learning classes, methods etc (as with Java) - simplest code in Python will have a single line only;
• on the other hand it has all features of mature object oriented language so it is easy to get acquainted with them before learning other languages;
• it also have nice functional features allowing to get introduced for further learning of functional languages (like Haskell, Erlang or Scala);
• at last, but not least, it is industrial-scale language - many programs and web-applications are written in it - so it is not the language which you learn in vain (like Scratch) without opportunity to find a job in future.

The main disadvantage of Python, as for me, is the existence of not well compatible 2-nd and 3-rd versions. However if you start learning it - prefer 3-rd version, it is more contemporary (while 2-nd is still more widely used in industry - but things are going to change, I hope).

For conclusion: Best Resources to Learn Python