12 Best Languages for Web Development in 2023

What is Web Development? 

Web development is a multi-discipline activity to create and maintain your websites. It requires you to acquire the knowledge of tools and frameworks to build responsive, interactive, and visually appealing web pages. Moreover, it has two categories – front-end web development and back-end web development.

Before we dive deep into choosing the best languages for web development in 2023, let’s address a few queries that one must have in mind.

1. Is becoming a Web Developer worth it in 2023-2024?

The number of developers will be  28.7 million in 2024. But to survive in this challenging market for web development, you need a constant upgrade of your knowledge and skills.

The role of a web developer offers excellent remuneration and equally brilliant career growth. This job is in high demand as the digitization of businesses is increasing worldwide, and companies are now relying on websites to interact with their clients effectively. Also, it can provide improved solutions for UX, cybersecurity, blockchain, IoT, AI, ML, and more. 

2. Which languages for web development are in demand?

• JS is the most sought-after language (63.61%)
• HTML/CSS combination is the second most popular language (52.97%)
• Python grabs the third-highest market in the industry.

3. Which ones are growing in popularity and will be in demand soon?

Python is one of the popular languages right now, and the demand for this language is increasing daily. Its popularity is mainly down to the readable syntax, vast community support, and reusable codes.

Also, its built-in modules help automation testing and eliminate repetitive manual tasks. Thus it becomes popular among testers and developers. JS, HTML, and CSS have a never-ending demand in this market as they are the basics of web development. 

Another language named TypeScript captured the market because of its scalability and readability.

Top 7 Back-end Web Development Languages

1. Python

Python is the most popular open-source, back-end web development language in 2023. You can easily learn this application and start working with it. It offers extensive libraries and frameworks that support technologies like Machine Learning, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence. Again you can create automation test scripts using this language.

Features:

1. It supports different programming concepts such as – OOP, functional programming, and structured programming.
2. You can use this language to create GUI. Python also provides several web development frameworks itself.
3. It easily integrates with other programming languages like C, Java, and C#.
4. It provides dynamic typing capabilities. This feature becomes beneficial when you require consistent content changes in complex websites.

2. PHP

PHP is an open-source scripting language. Generally, it is used for dynamic and complex websites. It executes on the server side and creates dynamic pages. You don’t need to compile it because it’s an interpreted language.

Features:

1. You can easily embed this language with HTML scripts and tags.
2. It supports all major databases like MySQL, ODBC, etc.
3. It provides in-built error reporting constants like E_ERROR, E_WARNING, etc. to report errors.
4. Also, it has other features – platform independence, local server support, etc.

3. Java

Java is an object-oriented, platform-independent, and secured programming language. Oracle is the owner of this language. Most of its syntaxes are based on C++. There are different testing frameworks in this market for unit testing in Java – Selenium, JUnit, TestUnit, etc.

Features:

1. It’s completely based on the object-oriented programming (OOP) concept. You can learn the concepts of class, object, inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and abstraction.
2. Java has an excellent security feature because it doesn’t allow pointers like C, C++. Moreover, it has other security components like a virtual machine, classloader, security manager, and bytecode verifier.
3. It can handle multiple threads easily.
4. Additionally, it supports effective memory management, portability, architecture neutrality, etc.

4. C#

C# is another OOP language developed by Microsoft. They built this language for the .NET framework and the Windows applications. But nowadays, you can also use it for Android, iOS, and Linux platforms. It’s well known for its game and mobile application development.

Features:

1. It provides a type-safety coding concept. So it never allows unsafe typecasting.
2. It provides scalability, updates, robustness, and interoperability.
3. It inherits the feature of garbage collection and automatic memory management from the .NET framework.

5. Ruby

Ruby is a widely used object-oriented backend language for web development. It’s commonly known as Ruby on Rails because you have to use it on the Rails framework. It has the same features as other scripting languages.

Features:

1. Ruby supports dynamic and duck typing. All the classes and modules are built in Ruby. Thus it’s dynamic. As it supports duck typing, you can use any variable to hold any object.
2. It uses naming conventions for constants, variables, and method names.
3. It supports single inheritance, missing methods, singleton methods, and more.

6. Swift

Swift was developed by Apple in 2019 to work on Apple’s platforms – iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc. This language helps you to improve UX for Apple devices and provides tools set and API in this regard.

Features:

1. It has advanced animation control. It can create multiple animation tracks or sequences of animations using advanced technologies.
2. You can make spatial apps by using RealityView on your 3D objects.
3. SwiftUI offers elements like VStack, HStack, and more to design layouts naturally and consistently.
4. It supports UI testing, accessibility testing, and localization testing.

7. Kotlin

Kotlin is a contemporary programming language made by JetBrains. It has complete interoperability with Java. Thus you can operate it on the JVM without any difficulties. Also, it allows us to utilize the frameworks, libraries, and resources from Java. It’s a popular language for Android app development. You run unit tests using Kotlin on the JUnit framework.

Features:

1. It offers a null safety measurement to prevent your code from null pointer exceptions.
2. Kotlin provides type inference. With this feature, the compiler automatically assumes a variable’s type and removes the explicit type declarations.
3. It has built-in support for asynchronous programming. 

Top 5  Frontend Web Development Languages

1. HTML

HTML is the fundamental language for web development and it standardizes your web page creation. So, learning HTML is mandatory for all web developers. It describes the structure of a web page and is responsible for the visual appearance of your web page.

Features:

1. It offers a semantic structure for your web pages. Thus it defines some unique tags, such as – <header>, <footer>, <div>, <p>, and more.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the greatest feature of HTML. When you search for content, the search engines accumulate information from WWW with the help of HTML. Its semantic structure helps to do so.
3. It has advanced browser storage capabilities on the client side. So it provides sessionStorage and localStorage for the developers to store data for the client side. 

2. JavaScript

You can use JS for both the frontend and backend web development. It is one of the best web development languages in 2023. With this language, you create dynamic web elements like animated graphics, clickable buttons, links, images, etc..

Features:

1. It validates users’ inputs by informing them about the incorrect data and required fields when providing inputs at forms.
2. It has predefined functions to handle date and time.
3. It can detect the OS and browser information of the user.
4. Additionally, it has modern features like arrow functions, template literal, property shorthand, etc.

3. React

React is a JS library created by Facebook in 2013. You can create web and mobile apps by using its framework React Native. It offers reusable components for JS. That’s why it reduces development complexity and time. There are different testing libraries – Mocha, Chai, Jest, etc. for React.

Features:

1. It uses JavaScript Syntax Extension (JSX). This syntax is a combination of JS and HTML.
2. It supports virtual DOM and one-way data binding.
3. React includes several extensions such as – React Native, Flux, Redux, etc.

4. Angular

Angular is a front-end, MVC framework that uses TypeScript programming language. It’s used for developing complex and single-page web apps. It uses HTML for UI development.

Features:

1. It uses DOM structure and updates the tree structure of HTML tags.
2. It supports TypeScript. The Angular-TypeScript combination offers better syntactic structure and makes the codebase easy to maintain.
3. Angular has bi-directional data binding. That means the DOM states modifies according to the changes in UI elements and vice versa.
4. You can use the Jasmine testing framework to write test cases in Angular. Also, there is a Karma framework as the task-runner for your testing.

5. VueJS

VueJS is an open-source beginner-friendly front-end language for single-page web apps. You will get features of Angular and React frameworks from VueJS. Popular websites like Grammarly, Alibaba, and GitLab use this framework.

Features:

1. VueJS uses virtual DOM, data binding, and event handling.
2. It allows application of transitions on HTML elements and supports third-party animation libraries.
3. It uses pre-built directives like – v-else, v-if, v-show, etc. to perform front-end actions.
4. Moreover, it offers a vue-router for routing purposes and watchers for handling data changes. 

Choosing the Best Language for Web Development in 2023

Choosing the best language for web development is a difficult task. You have to select the languages based on the requirements. By the way, you can’t depend on one language for development. You must have skills in 3-4 languages. So, you can start with languages that are easy to learn and straightforward.

• For the front end, the popular combination is HTML-CSS-JavaScript. JS is a highly demandable and adaptable language. If you master this language, you can work in both front-end and back-end technologies. 
• If you’re looking for back-end development, there are languages like Python, Java, Php, etc. They have easy syntaxes, scalability, and flexibility.
• Finally, you have to consider the complexity of your project. For complicated webs like – e-commerce, banking, and enterprise, you may need to work with C++, C#, etc. Thus, you need to choose them accordingly.

For the ideal delivery of a development project, you can rely on BrowserStack infrastructure to speed up the testing.

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FAQs

1. Is Python or C++ better for web development?

Python is better for web development because it’s straightforward and provides greater scalability. 

2. Is Python or HTML better for web development?

Both are good for web development and easy to learn. Python is a back-end language. HTML is the front-end language and contains the fundamentals of web development.

3. Is Python good for web development?

Python is a popular web development language due to its simplicity. Popular websites like Instagram, Uber, Quora, etc., use this language. Once you have learned it, you will get different projects and career opportunities.

4. Is Java or C++ better for web development?

Java is better than C++ because it’s easier and more secure. As it eliminates the concept of pointers, it’s become highly secure.