People around the world speak so many languages. But have you ever wondered how many programming languages are there? Spoken languages have a wide variety all-round the globe there are 1.5 billion people who speak English and 375 million native speakers. And in this technology driven world. How many languages are there for computers? The answer is more than 700 languages. Though there are 50 that are the most popular programming languages in use today. There is a wide variety of languages used by coders, software developers, web developers, and other computer science professionals.
There is such a dizzy array of programming like Java, JavaScript, and Coffeescript; Python and Ruby; C, C++, C#, and Objective-C; Cobol, ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68, ALGOL W, and BASIC; Fortran, Assembly languages, and machine language. Java may be the best programming language with approximately 5.3 million clamming to have that skill on LinkedIn.
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List of Programming Languages
Here is a list of programming language that are popular and in use by big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple and are historically significant in building our world where it is now.
What Is a Programming Language?
A basic definition of programming language is ‘A programming language is a formal language comprising a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output.’ The languages that are used by humans such as english or hindi can’t be understood by computers. Computers have their different language which is binary which is not understood by humans (unless we make an effort to learn it). So, in simple words, programming language is an intermediate way of communicating with computers.
These languages are instructions that we give computers to complete tasks. We do this by writing programs. We can achieve a lot of tasks by using programming languages. For instance, develop software applications, generating statistical analyses, loading webpage etc.
Which languages to learn?
With more than 9000 languages in the world it can be difficult to choose which one should you learn. So, this is where we come in narrowing down your choice to help you choose the best and before making a decision you have to look at the following things:
- The things you are interested in developing
- Your own personal preference
- The limitation of the language
- How you will enhance your carrier with this field
- Whether the language is on rise or decline.
When the language starts declining in its popularity that’s the sign it will not be used further. One thing that people look into the programming languages is that they think about their future with that language but the first thing they should think about the is how should they learn the language if there is a passion from within for the languages to be learnt because we can get confused by how many programming languages are there.
Knowing what kind of things, you’re likely to want to develop is really helpful too. Here’s a table that might help you decide:
| To be a developer | What to learn | What to avoid |
| Games | C, C++, Python, and DarkBASIC | Ada, Java, Fortran, COBOL |
| Online (web) applications | HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL | Ruby, ASP, Perl, ColdFusion |
| Science & Engineering applications | Fortran, Pascal, Ada, C++, and C | BASIC, COBOL, Java |
| Business applications | C, C++, Java, Python, and SQL | Fortran, COBOL |
| Educational Applications | BASIC, Python, Pascal, Java, C, C++ | Fortran, COBOL |
Some programming languages for the beginners, we will categorize them in 3 categories as easy, hard and very hard.
| Easy | Hard | Very Hard |
| Python | JavaScript | Ada |
| HTML | Pascal | Java |
| CSS | SQL | Perl |
| XoXo | PHP | Ruby |
| Basic | C,C++ | Fortran |
Now coming towards the future prospect of some of the programming languages that can help you land your dream jobs. We have divided it in 3 sections of skill required, base employment, and salary.
| Skill required | Base employment | Salary |
| Ada | very low | High |
| Java | High | High to very High |
| Java Script | High | High |
| Python | Low | Mid low |
Why Are There So Many Programming Languages?
As we learned before that programming languages basically provide a middle ground for humans and computers to communicate. Some of these languages are high-level whereas some are low-level. The languages which are high-level are easier to use but less detailed. On the other hand, the languages which are low-level provide more control over the computer but are hard to use.
Additionally, there are some languages which are made to perform a specific function. For instance, some programming languages are made for designing video games, controlling automated factory machines, for creating Artificial Intelligence etc.
Markup and Query Languages
Technically speaking, ‘A markup language is a computer language that uses tags to define elements within a document.’ It is a human readable language which does not consist of typical programming syntax. HTML is a markup language that allows people to annotate content which will display in web browser. As mentioned above, it doesn’t really contain instructions or support basic functionality like conditional statements. Because of this many people don’t consider it a programming language.
Query Language is a programming language which requests and retrieves data from database and information systems by sending queries. SQL is one such query language which stands for Structured Query Language. It is used for communication with a database. Query languages work little differently from basic programming such as JavaScript or Python.
Conclusion:
We have provided you with knowledge of how many programming languages are there and their benefits of using these languages for your future prospect and how they have affected our world in a good way to make it more simpler and fast. Thank You for reading this.