14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Jobs once said, "I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think."
Unfortunately, he didn't say which programming language we should start with, but as we know him, he would have probably recommended Objective-C, or Swift, if he had lived long enough to see Apple's most recent programming language.
While there are countless of online services where you can take basic programming classes, choosing the programming language to start with is of great importance, setting you on a career path for the rest of your life.
According to Udacity, a portal where people can learn to code, four major criteria should be considered before choosing your programming language.
Four basic criteria that you need to consider
First off, there’s the language's application. If you like developing games over mobile apps and websites, the languages you'll need to learn are totally different, which makes perfect sense, since programming languages are usually created for a well-defined purpose. Take R for example, a programming language developed to be used only for statistical analysis.
The second criterion is salary. There are lots of languages that pay really well when it comes to average yearly salaries. Unfortunately, there are some that don't. You’d better make your choice and be happy with it from the beginning.
The third criterion for choosing the programming language to learn is geography, meaning that having lots of people that code in the same language around you can really come in handy if you ever need a helping hand.
Fourth and final is popularity, which is really important if you plan to work as a freelancer. A language needs to be popular enough to generate new projects on which you could work, otherwise you're stuck with unusable knowledge. But enough words, here's the infographic:
