[notfed]

Never believe that any tool is good or bad. That's always going to be a generalization, and therefore wrong. Learn as many tools as possible, and know which use cases they're good at and which use cases they're bad at. If someone implies the tool is bad for all use cases, know that we all live in our own bubbles and are ignorant about the plethora of other use cases that exist in the world.

[eru]

> Never believe that any tool is good or bad. That's always going to be a generalization, and therefore wrong.

Some generalisations are close enough to true to be worth it.

Eg I'm fairly confident to generalise and say that for most beginners in 2025 picking Python is a better choice than PHP or Cobol.

Of course, you can come up with some contrived scenarios where the beginner would be better served with Cobol.

[gregjor]

> Eg I'm fairly confident to generalise and say that for most beginners in 2025 picking Python is a better choice than PHP or Cobol.

Limiting choices to “pick one” seems contrived. Beginners should learn to program and think like programmers, which means learning multiple languages and tools. Programming languages have far more in common with each other than not and the sooner a beginner thinks of themselves as a problem solver rather than a Python programmer the better.

> Of course, you can come up with some contrived scenarios where the beginner would be better served with Cobol.

I don’t think looking at job opportunities and pay qualify as “contrived scenarios.” PHP has a huge footprint in web applications and every beginner steered away from PHP to the saturated Python world forgoes a lot of opportunity. And again nothing prevents learning both. COBOL as usual gets trotted out as the dinosaur, but right now in the current tech job apocalypse knowing COBOL would get a lot more job offers than knowing Python.

[eru]

Thanks for illustrating my point.