[baq]

Java the language used to be so simple that it needed significant library usage to accomplish anything at all. It aimed for ‘safe C with classes’ and succeeded… in the enterprise where management was making technical decisions. After feeling the heat from C# it managed to catch up, mostly, to modern realities. Not a good beginner language, despite the simplicity.

PHP was not designed at all. It took a decade to make it more than a template processor. The biggest, by far, selling point was ease of deployment: ftp and done. Good if you want to display something in a browser. Learning programming, not so much.

Javascript is starting to become a sane language with ES6. It’s an accident of history that became an industry standard due to sheer power of will of browser companies. Tooling complexity in its ecosystem rivals, if not exceeds, that of C++. Recommending js s as a language to learn programming on has been until last couple of years irresponsible.

Python was designed to be beginner friendly, it was the next iteration of other beginner-friendly languages that had some academic research done about, you guessed it, beginner friendliness. It is not an accident it’s recommended for newbies! Due to that and a decade of 1) numpy for biological computing 2) django/flask for web services it’s ubiquitous in two very loosely connected domains, giving birth to jupyter and tensor libraries, and here we are. Turns out a batteries-included standard library makes packaging not a priority for too long.