I am writing this article because a couple of weeks ago this question was asked by a potential client, and I was placed in the precarious position of having to explain why my programming language of choice was the “best”. Oh, I was good! I spewed all the commonly used technical terms, such as: Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Enterprise Level, Modular, Scalable…, you know the rest. And to be honest, I personally do believe that open-source is the best option for most projects. Using open-source (PERL, PHP, JAVA, etc) there is a tremendous cost savings and there are many freely available libraries to extent the application. However, I am not going to say that open-source languages are better than proprietary languages. This is an argument that you can not win.

Before we continue let me say that all modern programming languages are basically the same. The are considered Curly Bracket languages and are all derivatives of the C programming language.

That being said, what is the best curly bracket programming language? Well, that’s a loaded question, because some languages are better at some things than others. For instance, we generally use PERL for our web development projects. Now, PERL is a powerful language, PERL is scalable and so on. But, PHP is just as powerful and PHP offers many built-in functions to work with arrays and My SQL, that can save the programmer a lot of time and coding. On the other hand, PERL offers some very powerful text processing properties that are unriveled by any programming language. Furthermore, PERL can communicate the UNIX/LINUX at the system level, which can make it much easier to setup automatic processes and background operations. So that ends the PERL or PHP debate. They are both good languages, with similar syntaxes, and neither one is clearly the superior.

What about JAVA? How does JAVA fit into the mix? Well, most “hard core” JAVA programmers will snear and scoff at you if you seem to suggest that another language is nearly as powerful as JAVA. Don’t even think about it! In my opinion and experience, JAVA is a great language. As a matter of fact, JAVA is not unlike any other programming language I have used. The hardest thing about learning JAVA (for me at least), was thinking in objects. JAVA is a pure object-oriented language, so there is a learing curve. But, JAVA can’t do anything that I can’t do in PHP or PERL. Now, most JAVA programmers will say that JAVA is fast and secure, and therefore it is the perfect solution for “Enterprise” level applications. Maybe that’s true, but who’s holding a stop watch? Where are the benchmarks? Its all just hype.

Now lets discuss Microsoft’s proprietary programming environment. Microsoft’s modern development evnironment is the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is a managed runtime environment, similar to JAVA. And to be honest, the .NET framework is by far the best option for development on Microsoft’s servers. .NET applications can be written in (and get this): ASP.NET, JScript, Visual Basic.NET or C#, but also open-source languages like PERL and Python. On Microsoft’s servers, .NET applications are considered to be much faster than non .NET applications, because the entire website and application files are precompiled into one or several .dll files.

I would hate to write an entire article entitled “What’s the best programming language” and not give an opinion. In my opinion the best programming language is… the best language for you, the programmer, to get the job done with. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but you know its true. For me, the best programming language is PERL. I love PERL and use it everyday. I like PERL because if can easily do simple things and then it can “strap it on” and do complicated things. I’m sure you feel the same way about your language.

I know I have missed your favorite language. But, I only mentioned the programming languages that I have personal experience with.