I used to work in a Perl shop and must admit that the language is very simple for tasks like these, but as you mentioned it's not fast at execution time. I'm now a Go programmer professionally but I taught myself the language while in college purely out of interest and eventually found my way to the job, not the other way around. I've recently been learning a little rust because of how much that language comes up in conversations around Go. I find the concept of the borrow checker nice but I have to admit I feel lost like I am in most flavors of new fancy framework js. That's not to say Rust is really anything like js, but the learning appears the same to me as someone who's convinced they could learn just about any programming language if it was necessary (over time I've seen procedural, OOP, declarative and functional stuff but never programming logic outside of the prolog code I wrote in school).

Go isn't made for your specific task at hand but it's a very easy language to pick up and it has good directory traversal standard library code and good regex (even though with time perl's has been optimized to be faster and I think it's written in C++) but more than anything Go is "cloud native" programming in that an awful lot of new microservice tech stacks are centered around it, docker and kubernetes are written in it, and there's a thriving community whose focus is generally web-first and performance-oriented. This means for your use case there might already be a large cohort of gophers that have asked the stackoverflow questions for you

I personally would push you towards the NYT Profiler for Perl before I would towards Rest, but that's because I know you wouldn't waste any time being able to get to the task at hand and then make it go faster, and I expect all but a few rustaceans would be able to do so with the same speed.

Whatever you pick I wish you the very best of luck!

For web development I would suggest to take a look into Elixir. Elixir is extemely good for real time apps through websockets, apps with a need of high concurrency and / or apps where you need to process hundreds of thousands of states of differents users in parallel thanks to the actor model that comes with Erlang virtual machine. To solve these kind of problems in another stack could be really hard and painful (including your current stack).

It's true that Elixir is a niche stack ( It deserves way more popularity in my opinion), so, if your concern is to learn something that would keep you inside the trend and market, instead of Rust or Elixir I would suggest Go. Go it's another outstanding language, will a lot of virtues, small and easy to learn, with it for example, you could compile the same application to different operating systems just with a special compiler command (And the compiler is blazing fast). You can also start with a lot of good libraries that helps you to keep your code clean and under control and of course, it's performance is very good too.

Hope my suggestions could be helpful.

Best regards, and happy coding!

Golang is to my mind by far the greatest bang for your buck in terms of investing your time it has a low barrier to entry. Elixir is fun and all, but it is VERY VERY niche. You are very unlikely to find a job directly requiring Elixir. Rust is a good option depending on what you want to achieve but golang is a great general-purpose language that has a very approachable learning curve, great documentation and a lot of jobs available. There are some very high profile projects written in golang. Docker, Kubernetes, InfluxDB and Grafana just to name a few. I was at this same junction at the end of 2018 having spent a lot of time in JS/TS & Ruby. I had already learned Elixir and done a couple of projects in it and I switched to Golang as I didn't want to learn niche languages. I have never regretted my choice. Obviously, every tool has its place but golang is a winner if you want to learn something new :)

Rust is more useful compared to C on some cases like in web assembly. C is more tedious to code. Rust is modern and has a lot more of opportunities. If you are also investing for the future I recommend Rust over C.

It must be Rust, It absorbs the advantages of other languages，safe, good performance and develop quickly, The community is also growing and active. I think there are some difficulties to learn Rust, but when you have mastered it, you will write good programs than C lang

Pick Rust. Rust can provide all what you need and has been a major language in blockchain/cryptocurrency industry. Swift is slower than Rust and does not have such support in the networking and domain field. Swift tooling is great only on macOS, therefore you are likely to have troubles on other platforms.

You can use swift of course. It’s more of a question of being performant.

You really want to try some basic operations and find what’s most performant for you.

Rust is wonderful for cloud applications requiring heavy concurrency, it has compile time checking for such things.

Go and C++ could be more performant in your case. Swift is really quite an obtuse language, with a lot of features, some which may complicate your implementation.

Also, you want to consider the market of developers who could help build it. If you use Go or C++ there is a larger collection of people who know the languages than there is with swift.

Rust is still in low demand. It's a great language but you'll have a hard time finding jobs. Go is the mix of both Rust and Python. Great language with modern features, fast, scalable, fun to write, and at the same time it has high demand (not as much as python).

Python on the other hand is a language that you can't go wrong with. Look around you and see what your job market prefers. If there isn't much difference to you personally, pick the one with more demand.

All of these are solid options, however considering your expertise currently, I would probably suggest Node.JS considering your past experience with JS. However Python offers a similar development environment to JS in my opinion, and Go is a good sort of intermediate between Rust and Node.JS and Python. It's fast, but not as fast as Rust, and offers a development experience that combines C-styled languages (like Rust), and Python-y languages... So: Rust for the fastest, Node for familiarity, Python for ease of development, and Go for a good middle ground. I have used all in personal projects... If you use Go, I suggest a easy to use web server framework like Fiber.

Rust is a challenging choice, but worth to be chosen. It has strong memory-safety and type-safety, this gives you no bother about those errors. However, static typing languages often slow our developing speed down in early stage. In that case, it's effective to write prototype in an easy language like Python, and rewrite it in a hard language. It's important not to be afraid to throw away first code you write.

The other answers are excellent, but I want to be a bit of a contrarian and say you should learn Rust. While the number of jobs for it are (relatively) low(er), it is certainly expanding and you'd be surprised at which companies do use Rust (Discord, for example, is starting to move away from Golang to Rust!).

But the main reason is that learning Rust itself will teach you a lot about systems design (/backend) because of its borrow checker. You can try out a lot of ideas and make a lot mistakes and the borrow checker will always be there guide you to a better solution (thereby teaching you in the process).

Also, I wouldn't underestimated how important managing memory (and memory safety) is. While Golang is great in some ways, it doesn't protect you from pushing memory leaks into production. And eventually you'll come upon a scenario where you'll have to make your Python code run faster and the optimizations you'd have to do won't look pretty (or be very Pythontic).

And Rust is freakin fast! If you have Rust, you wouldn't need any other language for the backend (or any other systems level code). Check this blog post: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust-a190bbca2b1f?gi=dd8bc5d669d. Discord found that even after spending months optimizing Golang code it still wasn't fast enough. But unoptimized, first-draft Rust code was (is) faster by an order of magnitude!

I will highly recommend Kotlin. I have worked with all three intensely and so far the development speed and simplicity is the best with Kotlin. Kotlin supports coroutines out of the box. Now, it isn't something that can't be implemented in other languages but Kotlin makes it super easy to work with them. Kotlin has a bit of learning curve, so, by the time you can actually use it idiomatically chances are that you will get proficient in Java too. But once you get it, you get it, then there is no other language ;) Kotlin is backed by Google and Jetbrains team so you can expect latest programming features and good community support.

It depends on which level and use cases you prefer to work at. Close to the machine? Rust is great but if you need to find more job opportunities, then take C/C++. Java has many job positions but I suggest Kotlin over it. Think about it as a better Java, but fewer job positions. Do you want to do your own projects? So a productive language like Ruby is way better. Like to program front-end apps? Take JS. Find your passion.

As you certainly know, there are languages that compile in meta-code for Virtual Machines (Java, C#, Kotlin) and languages that compile in Machine Language (Go, Rust). Apart specific domains (blockchain, IoT embedded software, AI, cloud) almost no-one uses languages that compile in machine language, for a series of reason, most of all security and portability. So, if you are going to learn for business go with Kotlin - Java is a bit ancien regime. If you seriously need to learn a language that compiles in ML - for example you will code for IoT - go with Go - or Rust - but keep in mind that Rust is much less used than Go. PS: Kotlin also compiles in ML, but I would choose a language designed for that, instead of one that compiles "also" in ML. PPS: Some Virtual Machines - ie: GraalVM - allow you to compile Java in ML. The world of IT is beautiful.

If you want a compiled language then go for Rust. It takes a certain mindset to get your head around its memory management system and the way it handles "borrowed" memory. However, it will generate blindingly fast code that you can cross-compile for other platforms. As a systems programming language I highly recommend it. Take time and learn it.

Java is only compiled to bytecode, not to machine code. So it executes in the Java Virtual Machine. DOn't think that its not fast, because the latest incarnation are very fast indeed. For most practical purposes, users of your code won't notice any difference. There are a heck of a lot of features in Java that you either have to import via crates in Rust, or write yoursef. So productivity-wise, Java may well beat Rust.

Kotlin is a Java-lookalike. It's a nice, and succinct version of Java and is totally interoperable. But its a bit niche, and for me it fails because my dev environment of choice (Spring Tool Suite) doesn't really play well with Kotlin. To use it you would be well advised to use iDeaj. I have used kotlin, and I like it, but not enough to ditch all my Java code.

Other contenders, depending on your platform of choice are Golang, C, C++, and C# (available as Mono on Linux systems).

I use Rust and Java and if you need a compiled language I recommend Rust.

I'd say Rust's knowledge will be more valuable in comparison. You can work in Blockchain development, compile to WASM (WebAssembly). There is a new JavaScript/TypeScript runtime named Deno (by the creator of Node.js) that has its backend in Rust.

I would go with Kotlin. It is pretty hyped currently.

You can use Kotlin for a lot of application types. To name some:

• Kotlin Multiplatform with Gradle
• Ktor (https://ktor.io)
• Spring Boot
• Kotlin JS (as you already know Javascript, you might like this one)

The code is also really concise, readable and modern. It also provides many features that you will find in many other programming languages.

I'd recommend you to take a look at Java and Kotlin, the first due to the number of companies that actively use it in your products. Kotlin is gaining adept since it is fully compatibly with the Java ecosystem but usually requires less code to do the same (ignoring other benefits of the language). Another benefits of the Kotlin is that it is in fact multiplatform, where you could use the same syntax to code for mobile, web and backend applications. The drawback of Kotlin, is the number of open jobs that exists currently compared to Java, but I pretty sure that it will change in the near future.

All those are nice languages, but Rust is harder to learn properly and has a smaller ecosystem. If you want to work in system programming (like hardware drivers) Rust is probably your choice. Otherwise, Java/Kotlin ecosystem is much larger and gives much more possibilities (maybe excluding low-level system programming).

When talking about Kotlin and Java, both are good. But Kotlin, again, gives much more opportunities. Kotlin-JS gives you browser applications, Kotlin-Native allows to compile to native application (and interop with them). Kotlin-WASM will be available shortly. Rust is better than Kotlin-Native for native development tight now, but not by far and it makes sense only if you are focusing only on native development.

python is a good language to start for the beginner.

Python is a great language to learn as a beginner. However, Go is really easy to learn as well and has a much more powerful standard library that will allow you to build very complex and powerful applications in the future. Go is becoming a standard in Cloud computing and concurrency. Both of which are very advanced but important.

I'd definitely start with Go. I know Python, Go and quite a few other languages.

Rust is not easy to learn as a beginner.

Python has way too many features to be called "easy" to learn. While it is very forgiving to beginner mistakes it feels like playing in a puddle of mud. It does not teach you clean programming at all. Unless of course you like messy.

Go on the other hand is very easy to learn. As a professional you can learn the entire language in under 2 hours. I have already given the tour of Go (https://tour.golang.org/) to complete beginners and they went through it very thoroughly and thereby knew the entire Go language in less than 5 days. While it is very easy to learn and very easy to read, it is quite strict on other things, guiding you to write clean code. For one it is a typed language and it is good to learn very early about types.

Knowing the entire language is of course not all there is to know. There is the standard library and a lot of other libraries to get to know in every language. Also one has to learn patterns in every language, get experience on how to structure code, dig deeper into the language itself to understand its inner workings, etc. That takes years in every language.

That being said, it depends very much on what you want to do with a language. If you want to go into ML and science you definitely need Python. If you want to go into cloud computing, distributed servers (which in my opinion any server should be nowadays), use Go. If you want to do systems level programming, e.g in hardware programming, use Rust.

I have experience in all three languages, and you should learn python first. These are three different languages (read: tools) to solve different problems you may have. Python is a high level language you can use for writing cross-platform scripts, web servers, AI, websites (e.g. Django) and the list goes on. Python can be used for most programming tasks while being the easiest to learn of the three and probably the most productive as well.

A lot of tech companies start out with Python for their web services, but due to Pythons slow speed and the pain that comes with dynamically typed languages when the code base grows, switch to Go later on when they need to scale. Go is a systems language that thrives when used for high performance cloud/web or networking services. Go is used in performance critical networking situations such as Twitch's streaming services and Uber's geofence services. It's also very clean and simple syntax that makes it very easy to quickly understand what code does.

Python is an interpreted language and Go is a garbage collected language, but Rust is a highly performant and reliable compiled programming language without the extra baggage of runtime memory management. Rust forces you to follow coding patterns that assure memory safety. This makes Rust a perfect fit for high performance algorithms, game engines or safety-critical systems, but would be overkill for web servers or scripts on modern hardware.

If all you want is a gentle intro and have access to tools and libs that can help with your tasks, Python is the way to go. It's ecosystem is huge and the language is easy to pick up. However, if you are aiming to get into software industry, I'd highly recommend you also pick up another classic language like C++/C#/Java. It really helps you cement some CS & programming fundamentals and get more familiar with the concept of software design and software architecture. Not saying you cannot achieve good architecture in Python or Go, but traditionally you have more materials covering these classic OOP languages. And once you learn them, you can apply your knowledge to other languages and it helps you understand other languages faster.

Rust is probably a bad choice for starting out. It is a low level language where garbage collection is not done automatically, and has to get you thinking about all the technical aspects. It is statically typed and compiled, so it's very strict with how you code. I do love Rust though, it's a nice language. Golang is also compiled and statically typed, but it aims to be for quick development, which makes it a better choice for starting out.

Python though can be great for starting out and getting a hold on how to program. You don't need to worry about things such as types, garbage collection, or an overwhelming amount of data types. Since I'm a JavaScript fanboy I can't help but say another great popular choice to start is JavaScript 😁

If you start learning programming I'd suggest Python language. I have no experience with Go and Rust so I cannot give you advice for them.

Python has the broadest reach as it's been around the longest; rust is much more difficult for a beginner to learn; I work with Go every day and it's probably the most productive general use language.

Go and Python are going to be much easier to learn than Rust. The memory management for Rust is pretty hard to wrap your head around when you are first learning how to do basic things with the language. Get familiar with programming first, then learn Rust.

I'd choose python because with a good knowledge of python and it's libraries, you could do literally anything. Also it has a relatively simple structure, so it won't be tough for a beginner.

Later on if you wish to learn Rust and Go, please do by all means.

I agree with most of the other answers here. Python is the best choice because it is super user-friendly, has an easy syntax, and can do many complex things in relatively fewer lines.

While Rust is a more recent and a great language nonetheless, it is slightly more complicated as it involves compiling and the syntax isn't so great.

And Go is the not a great choice either. While it has a decent syntax, keep in mind that Go won't be of much use unless you plan on working in Google. Even if you want to learn it, you can do so later.

I hope this helped you in making your decision, and welcome to the world of programming! I hope you enjoy.

Python is a great language to start programming with, there is an awesome python course on coursera by Dr. Charles Severance called Programming for everybody, check it out :)

Python, because its the easiest to learn as a beginer. Its often called "English without grammar" because its terms and writing style is quite similar to English. Python also has a diverse range of applications like Web App, Desktop App, Data Science etc

Learn/start with C; don't rush after buzz words. Python is easy to learn but you would not get the underpinnings of memory and pointers, an important aspect of programming.

Python is the easiest of the languages to learn, and while the slowest in production, it will teach many of the basic fundamental concepts of programming, especially if you're not going to be doing anything low level or at a system level.

Study, machine learning = Python | High performance computing, safety-oriented programming = Rust | Backend, feel productive with less runtime performance drawback = Go

Python is the best programming language for starting out as it is quite easy to learn, but it also is very powerful and you can do plenty with it. It will be useful for a long time. Python is my recommendation.

I would start focusing on Javascript because even working with Rust and Python, you're always going to encounter some Javascript for front-ends at least. It has: - more freelancing opportunities (starting to work short after a virus/crisis, that's gonna help) - can also do back-end if needed (I would personally avoid specializing in this since there's better languages for the back-end part) - hard to avoid. it's everywhere and not going away (well not yet)

Then, later, for back-end programming languages, Rust seems like your best bet. Its pros: - it's satisfying to work with (after the learning curve) - it's got potential to grow big in the next year (also with better paying jobs) - it's super versatile (you can do high-perf system stuff, graphics, ffi, as well as your classic api server) It comes with a few cons though: - it's harder to learn (expect to put in years) - the freelancing options are virtually non-existent (and I would expect them to stay limited, as rust is better for long-term software than prototypes)

I suggest you to go with JavaScript. From my perspective JavaScript is the language you should invest your time in. The community of javascript and lots of framework helps developer to build what they want to build in no time whether it a desktop, web, mobile based application or even you can use javascript as a backend as well. There are lot of frameworks you can start learning i suggest you to go with (react,vue) library both are easy to learn than angular which is a complete framework.

And if you want to go with python as a secondary tool then i suggest you to learn a python framework (Flask,Django).

go for javascript, brother.