Some comments on popular choices: I chose C++ because it's a horrible language that holds a lot of industry hostage. You can't use anything else because of tool

Some comments on popular choices: I chose C++ because it's a horrible language that holds a lot of industry hostage. You can't use anything else because of tooling and network effect, but writing C++ is painful and dangerous. A few years ago I would use PHP because it's so horrible and it destroyed a lot of innocent souls who entered programming via it, forever damaging their understanding of consistency, abstraction and modularity. But these days PHP is a dying emperor and there's no much reason to care. Visual Basic is even more strange choice because the language is not as bad (primitive, but not very bad) and you can skip it. People pick JavaScript because they don't like not having choice + having to adopt to quirks, but on other hand we could never get anything better. Imagine if browsers defaulted on some kind of BASIC (no OOP, confusing data types, obtuse data structures, no hash maps, huge confusing spec) and that's what we'd have to use? Brendan Eich is a genius, he created a language for twenty years in ten days. Java: Those who actually write in it have reasons to hate it, those who don't just translate their groupthink, I believe.