PHP. Be aware that both of these languages are rather...unique and promote some bad habits and I'm only recommending them because they're the fastest way to get started.
PHP hasn't been the fastest way to get started in years. Probably approaching a decade by now.
Reason being: hipster designers started getting into low grade web development. Things like single page web apps that require 10:1 clientside:serverside code. They worked their asses off to make it easy to hit the ground running.
It's why things like jsfiddle are popular, or nodemon, or easy-to-deploy webservers for experimentation, like python, javascript and ruby all have. I mean, I'm sure there's something similar for PHP, but all the rapid development is focused on what the hipster webdevs are doing, which is Javascript nowadays.
For 90% of application programming, using a functional language is trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
Depends on what you're doing. Well, and also depends on how you measure "90%".
90% of the total number of apps released? Yeah, probably not.
But if you're doing something that requires complex thinking, it's probably better to reserve as much of your brain power as possible for the problem at hand. Effort spent on plumbing is wasted.
Example: A project I'm working on involves getting users to collaborate on categorizing content. I'm trying to think of an algorithm that encourages users to contribute for the benefit of the group, without having any choke points. If the administration on the site have to settle disputes, that's less organic. It'd be neat to have a turnkey operation, where the rules of the site naturally encourage accurate results.
That sort of project is going to require extensive testing and tuning of the algorithm. It's essentially pure math. Anything that distracts from that will make testing the code (and making sure the theory is correct) that much more difficult.
These sorts of problems aren't all that rare actually. Any big site with a lot of users will want to experiment with crowd behavior.
Also, functional programming has properties that make scaling really easy.
The JVM is outdated and .NET will eventually replace it
You think? I was more excited / optimistic about .NET because Mono was looking pretty cool. But I haven't heard anything new from that corner in awhile.
Are you talking about GUI stuff? Because encountering Java GUI stuff in this day and age makes me laugh.
Rust and C can't coexist long term. Either C will destroy rust like it's done with so many other languages, or Rust will finally force C into a niche.
I think C has been in a niche role for awhile.
That is, C is almost exclusively used as either portable assembly, or as a glue language for extension libraries.
Though I don't know of any projects that use Rust either. Golang is a better candidate, I think. It's used for Docker.
The only Lisplike language that I've seen that seems decent is Racket.
Racket is a Scheme implementation. Although the line between "implementation" and "separate language" is blurry in the Lisp world.
Lisp isn't a programming language, it's a building material. You go into a Lisp project expecting the line between language and the resulting software to be very, very blurry.
Like the concept of userscripts in browsers is a very Lisp-like construction, albeit not the most ambitious route to take.
