What is the best programming language to learn (in 2025)?
For over 20 years, in various educational guises, I have pondered what programming language would be the best to learn for the future. The answer is always the same: it depends on market conditions, forces, and trends – and 2025 has a lot for us to consider.
Full-stack frameworks
The overarching change to this conundrum is the proliferation of frameworks that do all the little roles you need, and those particular professionals known as ‘Full-Stack’. We are constantly striving to be better selves, and with the emergence of AI tools, it’s never been more important to have more than one specialism, more than one single string. The more we can offer, the more useful we are as employees, and interestingly, the easier it is to pick up new skills when the need comes along.
I still vividly recall the pride I felt back in school in Year 6, when a new BBC computer was wheeled into our classroom, knowing that if anything went wrong I could tell the teacher that she had to press ‘ctrl + break’ to restart the system and start again. From that point, the BASIC(86) language had me hooked and I still credit my career to wanting to control the future.
Flash forward 20 years and I’m teaching Python to Secondary school students. Why? Because I still firmly believe that Python is the entry language into software engineering. It certainly does not stop there however. The first Framework I lost myself in was Django. The simplicity of Python, the ease of HTML and interactivity of JavaScript made web development a joy, but allowed me to dabble in the dark work of databases which I knew precious little of.
And that was the light bulb moment, I learned you can no longer rely on a single language to get you through a career. Instead, understand how the languages that make up a full stack approach communicate, interact, and provide a solution.
So I’m going to change the question! What stack or combination of languages do I want to learn to create a substantial solution?
Start with Front end
Begin with the basics of HTML / CSS, throw some bootstrap in if you fancy it. But learn the basics. I am still impressed daily with what some front end developers can do with CSS.
Move onto JavaScript, the language of interactivity and what bring most UIs to life. Take a dabble into TypeScript as well, although I might delay this until I’ve mastered Java as middleware (trust me, it makes much more sense afterwards!)
Then onto your framework. React is still up there for popularity and has its roots in JavaScript. It's immensely powerful, update after update, and lends itself to expedited, reliable front end development. If you ignored my advice about TypeScript, Angular becomes an option here too. It's harder to pick up than React, but still very much worth the effort.
Onto the Middleware
For me, there can only be one way forward. That’s Java and Microservices in Spring Boot. There are huge number of libraries to support development, and some very nice links to the data in the back end.
Yes, there are others that get an honourable mention - some of my best colleagues have forgotten more about C# than I will ever know and they would be disgusted with my choice here - but there you have it.
To the back end
Less important than how you store your data is how you access and get what you want from it. Take some time to really understand SQL syntax, then just adjust the connectors to suit the language you are using.
This may sound hugely simplified, but we all must start our understanding somewhere. Good coders and developers can build the main areas of the project and link them together, that’s the crux of what we do, and other than syntactical differences the main languages and approaches do it all in roughly the same way.
