Choosing a programming language to learn or apply is not always an easy process and often does not depend on personal preferences, rather than what is going to be worked on, or even what is strictly required by higher level staff members like the software architect. The following list introduces some of the most important factors you should consider when choosing a web programming language:
• Community - Although most languages nowadays have a detailed documentation on their official sites, programmers often get stuck in such problems that require more than the basics in order to be solved. A wide community supporting forums on a language is of a great help and will save you a lot of time as well as unnecessary lines of coding. If you’re among the few working with a language, chances are, you’re on your own, and no one can really help you on specific problems you might encounter.
• Security - Teams and individuals work hard to deliver secure ways for you to protect what you are building from harmful attacks, but don’t forget hackers also work hard to break down systems of their interest. Although languages get refined every year or so, choosing the actual most secure language (meaning the one which supports more security features than others) is the way to making sure your work is not going to be in the rubbish bin anytime soon (well, not always, but at least, you have to try)
• Future Stability - The field of web development is changing fast, and what users need constantly define new ways/processes/ tools that developers need to achieve their aims. Needless to say, programming languages are also on the famous process of rising and fading respectively for some and others. It is a good consideration to work with a programming language that you (or others) think that will still be popular after at least 5 years (so you don’t get to change what you’ve previously worked on every 1,2 or 3 years). A good example of a stable language is Javascript, which seems to have a long way to go into the history of web programming languages.
• Integration - Because companies/individuals that create programming languages also create tools and other technologies, it is common that some languages will work better using the tools created by the very same people who invented the language. For example, .NET works best if combined with other Microsoft technology, PHP and Apache are also a great match etc.
• Tools & Libraries - Programming languages are only the core, and there is a lot to be planned and researched in order to come up with what is required. At this point, tools and libraries provide predefined code (frameworks) to help you get more done and in a rather optimized way. Libraries do stand for a lot of complex functions that otherwise would be a pain in the ass and still even if you did pass the done phase, it would probably going to break down on some cases you hadn’t thought about.
Languages, usually, have their respective supporting libraries and tools that can be used to enhance productivity and efficiency. However, it is not always true that the more libraries are available to a language, the better this language is.
