Web pro­gram­ming languages: the best languages for web de­vel­op­ment

Whether you are watching videos on YouTube, net­work­ing with business partners on LinkedIn or reading an article on Wikipedia, these large, fre­quently visited websites generally run smoothly. The question of what scripts are running in the back­ground and how they have been pro­grammed usually only arises when you want to create a website yourself. Web de­vel­op­ment requires a number of decisions to be made be­fore­hand. For example, you need to consider whether you need to choose a good pro­gram­ming language, whether you want to hire a developer who has the skills you need or whether, as a pro­gram­mer yourself, you need to choose a web pro­gram­ming language which would enhance your knowledge and improve your portfolio.

Web pro­gram­ming languages can be used to define complex logical in­struc­tions and processes. While markup languages such as HTML can only be used to generate documents, you can use pro­gram­ming languages to create programs of any size to meet your needs. So what pro­gram­ming languages are es­pe­cially good for use with the web? What are they used for? Which languages are the most versatile, and which are fairly easy for novice pro­gram­mers to learn can be found in our article on learning to code. This overview of web de­vel­op­ment languages will answer these questions.

Java is an open source and platform-in­de­pend­ent pro­gram­ming language, which can be used for almost any situation thanks to its ver­sat­il­ity. It is object-oriented like most web pro­gram­ming languages. This means that it focuses on concrete ap­plic­a­tions. Its vast number of web frame­works and libraries, which generally have com­pre­hens­ive doc­u­ment­a­tion, makes it easier to create even highly complex web projects. Programs written in Java are easy to expand upon, can be scaled as required and are easy to maintain, provided that the pro­gram­mer who wrote them knew what they were doing.

Since Java is com­par­at­ively difficult to learn, resulting in fewer experts in this pro­gram­ming language, clients will have to deal with higher costs than when using other pro­gram­ming languages. Meanwhile, pro­gram­mers who are pro­fi­cient in Java are likely to have a com­par­at­ively high income.

Despite its name, this dynamic, object-oriented scripting language has nothing to do with Java, apart from them both being based on C. In 1995, Netscape developed JavaS­cript, ori­gin­ally called LiveScript, with the goal of expanding HTML and CSS to enable pro­gram­mers to evaluate user in­ter­ac­tions and dy­nam­ic­ally display content. Today, JavaS­cript is not just used for web browsers but also for micro-con­trol­lers and servers. The name JavaS­cript was chosen merely because of Java’s pop­ular­ity. At the time, people wanted to be as­so­ci­ated with it. This was a great success. Today, almost all the most popular websites use JavaS­cript as their pro­gram­ming language of choice on the client side. Ad­di­tion­ally, JavaS­cript has extensive frame­works and libraries.

This pro­gram­ming language is dy­nam­ic­ally typed and classless. It gives pro­gram­mers the choice of object-oriented, pro­ced­ur­al, or func­tion­al pro­gram­ming, making it a highly versatile pro­gram­ming language. This is es­pe­cially apparent in web browsers. For example, JavaS­cript can be used to dy­nam­ic­ally change websites, validate form entries even before they are sent to the target server, switch dialogue boxes as well as integrate scripts for down­load­ing and uploading. JavaS­cript has also become an essential tool for online marketing, as many ad­vert­ise­ments are pro­grammed with it. This language can also be used to read and write cookies, which makes modern marketing strategies such as targeting possible. In short, JavaS­cript has helped shape the modern internet and is an integral part of today's web browsing ex­per­i­ence.

Hypertext Pre­pro­cessor, better known under the old acronym PHP, is a scripting language based on C and Perl. It is mainly used for pro­gram­ming dynamic websites and web ap­plic­a­tions. PHP is con­sidered to be beginner-friendly and can be in­teg­rated into HTML. Therefore, it is often one of the first languages an aspiring pro­gram­mer learns. Many website operators still rely on PHP today, even though the language is widely viewed as a bit obsolete. Some of its most important ad­vant­ages include its broad support for various databases and its efficient in­teg­ra­tion of internet protocol. PHP has received several updates since its creation and is currently on version 7. This language has an open source license and is available free of charge.

PHP processes the code on the server side, bypassing the web browser's in­ter­pret­a­tion, which is usually en­countered in other popular internet pro­gram­ming languages. This also means that PHP is subject to stateless HTTP and stresses the queried web server much more than pro­gram­ming languages which only send the source code to a dedicated web browser. PHP is also cri­ti­cised for its weak typing and lack of stand­ard­ised error-handling functions. However, the fact that many major websites still use PHP is proof of its pop­ular­ity. Problems can arise, though, if website operators use outdated PHP versions which com­prom­ise the security and stability of the website.

Python is known as a high-level pro­gram­ming language and uses compact yet easy to un­der­stand code. Python is also easy to type because you do not need to separate blocks of code by using special char­ac­ters but rather by indenting. This is why the language is con­sidered to be enjoyable to learn and use. You can use it as required either for object-oriented, aspect-oriented, or func­tion­al pro­gram­ming. Python is also dynamic and is therefore often used as a scripting language. Python is supported by an active community and is kept up-to-date and relevant by the non-profit Python Software Found­a­tion. This language is freely available and can be used with most current operating systems.

Many popular web services like YouTube and other Google projects are partially based on Python. The video game industry has also embraced this pro­gram­ming language. The same can be said for sci­entif­ic projects. Python has become highly popular for this purpose primarily because most sci­entif­ic databases can be easily in­teg­rated with the language and because tasks which involve col­lect­ing empirical data can be carried out ef­fi­ciently using it. Python is therefore a par­tic­u­larly important pro­gram­ming language for beginners in these fields. However, it has been cri­ti­cised for its re­l­at­ively low execution speed and for how long-winded the defin­i­tions of its methods are.

Ruby is another high-level pro­gram­ming language. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto. This purely object-oriented pro­gram­ming language boasts dynamic typing and re­flec­tion as well as automatic garbage col­lec­tion. Ruby’s major dis­tin­guish­ing feature is its object-oriented focus in which every value and class is an object. Unlike other object-oriented pro­gram­ming languages, there are no primitive data types in Ruby. To put it briefly, “everything is an object.”

Ruby's syntax is con­veni­ently flexible. For example, the use of brackets is often optional. This makes the language easy to read and often makes it look like a markup language. In spite of this, Ruby is very deep and also allows for meta-pro­gram­ming with which pro­gram­mers can generate methods, modify the in­her­it­ance hierarchy and change other constants in the pro­gram­ming language as they see fit. This is why Ruby is con­sidered “easy to learn but hard to master”. Critics have voiced concerns about the negative con­sequences of having typos in program code. In such cases, un­ex­pec­ted run-time errors can lead to tedious debugging sessions. Ruby is often used as a scripting language for web servers but also sur­pris­ingly often in the video game industry. This language is available for all current operating systems.

C++ is based on C, one of the oldest pro­gram­ming languages. The de­vel­op­ment of this language, which was then thought of as an extension of C, began in 1979, but it was not released to the public until 1985. It is still very popular today. C++ is one of the pro­gram­ming languages with an ISO (In­ter­na­tion­al Or­gan­iz­a­tion for Stand­ard­iz­a­tion) standard. It is also con­sidered to be machine oriented and efficient as well as highly ab­stract­able and complex. C++ is fun­da­ment­ally easy to learn, es­pe­cially because the core language is concise using ap­prox­im­ately 60 key words. The language becomes more complex and com­pre­hens­ive through its standard library.

C++’s greatest strengths are its variety of com­bin­a­tions and its efficient machine-oriented pro­gram­ming. This allows highly complex processes to be in­teg­rated into basic functions. As a result, C++ pro­gram­mers can save time by relying on the core language and the standard library. Due to the fact that it is heavily based on C, this pro­gram­ming language has some dis­ad­vant­ages, such as its com­par­at­ively messy syntax. Nev­er­the­less, C++ is one of the most popular pro­gram­ming languages today when it comes to system and ap­plic­a­tion pro­gram­ming. However, when it comes to web pro­gram­ming languages, C++ has to be ranked lower than Java, JavaS­cript, and C#.

The re­l­at­ively new pro­gram­ming language C#, pro­nounced as “C sharp“, was released in 2001 and is con­sidered to be a general-purpose language. It is type-safe, object-oriented and fun­da­ment­ally platform-in­de­pend­ent. However, it was spe­cific­ally developed by Microsoft for the .NET Framework. C# is often also referred to as “Visual C#”, mostly for im­ple­ment­a­tions. Con­cep­tu­ally, the language is related to Java and C++ among others, but it extends the object-oriented model to include at­trib­utes which store in­form­a­tion about classes, objects and methods as well as delegates which refer to methods for specific classes. This primarily results in a more accurate error de­scrip­tion when compiling code, saving de­velopers a lot of time.

Many people believe C# is the most important pro­gram­ming language web de­velopers should learn besides Java. As an object-oriented web pro­gram­ming language, C# offers the best com­bin­a­tion of func­tion­al­ity and depth. Critics have warned that using C# ties you to Mi­crosoft's .NET Framework. Having said that, pro­gram­mers use it for a large portion of the market. Many pro­gram­mers now rely on C#, be it for de­vel­op­ing for Windows systems or for video games on Xbox and PC. C# is mainly used as a web pro­gram­ming language for web API's and various web ap­plic­a­tions.

The free pro­gram­ming language Perl appeared in 1987 and provided the in­spir­a­tion as an in­ter­preted pro­gram­ming language and a scripting language for languages such as PHP, JavaS­cript, Ruby and Python. The pro­gram­mers primarily used pro­gram­ming languages in the C family. This language is fun­da­ment­ally platform-in­de­pend­ent and was ori­gin­ally designed for network and system ad­min­is­tra­tion. Since then, Perl has also es­tab­lished itself as one of the most popular pro­gram­ming languages for web software, bioin­form­at­ics and finance.

Pro­gram­mers who use Perl benefit from a high level of freedom and efficient problem-solving. For example, you can modify texts with regular ex­pres­sions. Moreover, there are many freely available modules for Perl which can be retrieved from the Perl library CPAN. The pro­gram­ming language Perl is designed with the goal of always offering pro­gram­mers several ways to ac­com­plish their ob­ject­ives while remaining simple and efficient and working in a context-sensitive manner. Perl played a key role in the spread of the World Wide Web and continues to play a huge role today as a web pro­gram­ming language. Perl is used less fre­quently when proximity to the hardware (e.g. web servers) and speed (e.g. drivers) play a role.

Novice pro­gram­mers often find them­selves over­whelmed by the numerous options available in different languages. They can, however, look to major websites for guidance. Which pro­gram­ming languages do Facebook, Twitter, or Google use? Which ones are best for use on the client side and which for on the server side?

The following table shows that all websites mentioned work with JavaS­cript on the client side but on the server side rely on various pro­gram­ming languages. Only Yahoo uses PHP on the server side.