Yeah, but just take a look of how many sites are made in PHP and how many are made in Ruby. You should see the poll results of the thread too. It's PHP.
It is because of PHP is a best suit to create small applications, like websites. Thats why seeing like this in poll. But when you consider enterprise level of applications, Most suitable languages are Java or ASP.NET.
I wouldnt recommend starting off with something like ColdFusion because that's more so for dynamic sites, and you can achieve similar effects by combining javascript with html and php. I would recommend learning php first though as it is the easiest to learn. Who's saying Java's easier than php? That's not good advice for a newbie programmer. PHP is very informal and not as strict as C++ or Java so definetly easier to learn to get your feet wet in programming
There is no best language, period. When it comes to what to learn next, you have to ask yourself what you're learning the language for. Is it web development? Or are you wanting to develop software? Each language has it's pros and cons. Each language is better suited for certain tasks than others. For example Perl. I love the language, I know it well, I use it often... but would I recommend it for web development? No. I use it for that, but just because I do doesn't make it the right tool. A much better language would be PHP. PHP has built in database functionality, Perl does not. PHP is embedded into HTML. Perl programs print HTML. Is there something I can do in one language that I can't in the other (in this scenario)? No, but PHP sure as hell makes things easier. On the opposite end there's software development. Again the language you should learn depends on a number of factors, but all in all I'd stay away from anything BASIC. You want a real language like C or C++.
Well, it`s for web, but it`s a programming language too. As for it`s speed, it is very similar to C++ so works great
In that case, Java is the fastest language on the list. When you talk about ASP, if you really meant C# and ASP.NET then it is a tie between that and Java. Having said that I personally prefer Python as a web development language. For desktop work I use C and Objective-C. Edit: It seems the poll used to have C++ listed, but does not anymore. At the time of making this post Java and C# were the fastest ones on the poll. Changing poll options mid thread doesn't help conversation.
I thoroughly enjoy working with PHP, it is deceptively simple but incredibly powerful when you take advantage of all it's features.
Back in the day the standard recommendation for first language to learn was Basic/Visual Basic. I think these days it has to be PHP. It's simple and quick to develop in. It's fairly mature, which means it's feature-full and there is a lot of documentation and books out there. It's easy to deploy and PHP hosting is cheap and easy to find.
Ironically both Basic / Visual Basic and PHP are the two languages which are likely to teach beginners pretty poor programming habits. Although I see more people recommending Python or Java as a first language than I do those recommending PHP (thankfully).
I have nothing against Java, but I think for a beginner it is very important to have quick coding-to-seeing-results turnaround to encourage continued interest. It's a revelation to produce your first few useful programs which you can share with others (or gain profit from if you're lucky) when you're starting out, rather than "Umm yay, I just converted Celcius to Fahrenheit." PHP is great for that; it's straightforward to build something semi-usable and it's easy to distribute to anyone else via the web. And that's very important, the web part of it. It's easier to say "Look what I made. Click on this URL" rather than "Look what I made, download this JRE thing, then take this jar file and this bat file and and..." or to wrestle with the complexity of server-side Java (not to mention finding affordable hosting). And to me, that's a very big motivator to the budding programmer, being able to share your tentative first steps easily like that. Maybe that's the root in our difference of opinion on this. I presume that you're thinking of it as a question of what's the best for laying the firm foundation for best practices. I'm seeing it more as a problem of, the foundation won't matter if the budding programmer gives up out of discouragement after they realize that making and distributing any sort of useful app in Java is too much of a learning curve when you're just starting out. There's time to work on proper fundamentals later, once you've got the hang of things. Heck, I started out with GW-Basic when I was in high-school and was writing spaghetti-code with nothing even resembling a subroutine for the first while. I still turned out a pretty decent developer, or at least, I like to think so...
It depends from situation to situation, and from person to person. As I only develop for web, I only use php, which is easy to learn, and flash, with witch you can do pretty much. But if you are a platform devver, you might try languages like Cpp and Python. I've tried to learn both of them, but I gave up after a while, because I liked web developing more.
PHP is the best- because 1) it is widely used 2) fast 3) use less resources 4) has influence of c, c++, and perl 5) easy to understand 6) Free (open source) 7) ........(add more point here)