I'm a junior in high school, and I dabble in a few languages like Python and php. What do you think is a good language to pursue in the coming years? I've heard Ruby and php are some of the top. What is your opinion?

Python is definitely a keeper: it's just really fast to dev with because of its low verbosity and the metric shitton of libraries available. It's quite popular in the industry, so you're also likely to work with it, especially if you want to work in data science or scientific computation.

JavaScript (and very basic HTML) is a must for just how useful it is to know how to write functionality into webpages. It's also nice that you can use it to build browser extensions for yourself, as well as plugins for election apps (such as VS Code and Atom). I personally love how you can somehow just roll your head around on the keyboard and produce functioning JS Code.

Finally, if you have any interest at all in embedded devices, learn C/C++, most toolchains for embedded only support these, and setting up custom toolchains is a pain you don't want to get close to.

Whatever you do, just don't Java, let it die, it's tired. If you need JVM bytecode, there are much better languages to use

To start with, choose python. It gives a good foundation for other languages and gets you into a more structured environment then PHP will, plus it’s driving the AI and ML world at the moment so there’s plenty of opportunities if they interest you.

From python I would suggest jumping up to c#/Java to work with stricter languages.

Then and only then when you have a good sense of coding practises, look at PHP. PHP... although a simple language that allows you to do virtually anything with it in any way you choose, will easily turn into a magical mess if you don’t have a strong background in clean and maintainable code, for everything it does easier then other languages, it’s quite difficult to do things right and in a scalable and maintainable way.

Python is on the rise, even in web development.
AND python is awesome:)

Besides that I think some knowledge of c is always good to understand what happens behind the scenes.

In my personal opinion, ones you know the basics of e.g. c, python or Java, you’ll be able to learn PHP in almost no time..

@teganburns I like your opinion on this;)

Overall, the trend seems to be towards Node from what I've seen. Definitely worth picking up, especially with how ubiquitous JavaScript is.

To counter some of the other comments... while it's true Ruby has lost some popularity, it's still quite widely used, especially by large companies, and it tends to pay quite well.

My recommendation is to give all languages you're considering a try. Go through a tutorial or two and see which feels the most natural. The results may surprise you.

Anyway, someone here summed it up pretty well when he said all other languages seem very clunky compared to Ruby, so I'm pretty confident you'll at least like it. Let us know how it goes!