What is the best programming language to learn?

The answer is more than choosing R over Python, or Python over everything else. :-)

It’s a question that comes up in many instances among new developers and data analysts.

What is the best programming language to learn?

It comes up for data science — should I learn R? Should I learn Python?

But that question is not the best question to ask.

There are a lot of programming syntax, each with enough use cases and frameworks to teach a data analyst, data engineer, a programmer, or even an AI engineer the logic behind each function.

In short it’s the logic that you are chasing. Using one programming language will provide the right workflow for learning that logic, so when the day comes to pick up another language, you can begin to ask questions as to what functions and dependencies are analogous to what you know. If you know libraries for creating regressions in R, you can ask about the similar libraries in Python.

The key purpose behind selecting the best programming language is deciding what kinds of software or data model you want to create.

What to do to frame the right questions for your project or data model?

Write out the functionality of what you want to create from a minimal viable program perspective. Do so even if you are not using the syntax you think you’ll want for your project. This means a mindmap that shows how activity occurs and flows with your program. Use a bullet point to state an activity and state an outcome from that activity.

Writing out the functionality can highlight what framework needs you have for your app, software, or data model. The mapping can surface what frameworks to look up questions to ask more experienced programmers.

It also plays into using AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other large language models respond to details within a prompt; The details are the techniques like chain of thought and role-playing examples that you have likely seen or read about as prompt engineering.

The purpose of prompt engineering is to craft details that a LLm should address in its output. For prompts that involve programming syntax, you need to lay out what you are looking to create. You will have to indicate dependencies to make sure the code fits the environment it will perform in. So for example, if you know you need steamlit as a dependency, your prompt should indicate that library should be used in its answer.

What is the best programming language? It’s good to know syntax, be it Rust, Next.js, or R. But the best language is the one that can be described by natural language, because, thanks to AI and the blended applications of languages, natural language will be the ultimate language used to program.