• Java

Developed in 1995 by James Gosling, Java is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, mostly because of its ability to run on different types of computers. Owned by Oracle, it is used for mobile, desktop and web applications, web and application servers, games, database connection and even more! Considered to be both compiled and an interpreted language, Java is an object-oriented language that is intended to be easy to learn with a huge community of support as millions of developers use it. Open-source and free, it’s no wonder so many developers prefer this programming language. 

An example of Java: Amazon Web Services. “The world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centres globally.” – AWS Website

  • Ruby

An open source, interpreted, object-oriented program language, it was designed and developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (“Matz”) in Japan in the mid 1990s. A blend of Matz’s favourite languages, is mostly influenced from Perl and borrowing from the class library, it’s a reorganization or Perl’s functionality. Its language is ruby-lang.org and has a simple syntax. In Ruby, everything is an object and is seen as a flexible language since it allows its users to freely alter its parts. 

Example of Ruby: Shopify

  • PHP

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server scripting language used to develop dynamic and interactive websites. PHP was release in 1994 and created by Rasmus Lerdorf. Rasmus wrote several Common Gateway Interface programs in C, he then used them to work web forms and communicate with databases and called it “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” (PHP/FI). It grew organically to be a new programming language as this was not the original intended design. PHP is an interpreted language but can be compiled by bytecode by third party tools. It’s object-oriented, supported on various platforms and is compatible with almost all servers used today. Not limited to output HTML, can output images, PDF files and Flash movies as well as text. 

An example of PHP: WordPress

  • Python

Guido van Rossum conceived the idea of Python in the 80’s in the Netherlands as the successor to ABC programming language, the first version was later released in 1991. An interpreted, object-oriented, programming language with a simple, easy to learn syntax. The syntax allows developers to write programs with fewer lines and is similar to the English language. Python is used for web and software development, mathematics and system scripting. 

An example of Python: Uber Engineering

  • JavaScript

JavaScript is considered the world’s most popular programming languages. Created by Brendan Eich in 1995 while he was at Netscape Communications Corporation (creators of Netscape Navigator web browser). As Java was too large and complex to appeal to amateurs, Netscape contracted Brendan Eich to design a more versatile programming language that would speed up web development alongside Java. JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language that supports both object-oriented programming with prototypal inheritance as well as declarative programming. JavaScript is interpretated and enables the creation of interactive web pages. 

Example of JavaScript: everyone uses JavaScript, but one example can be Facebook