Programming languages to know about

I've compiled a selection of programming languages (for the purpose if this article, I'm including shell scripting language), listed on Wikipedia (as of 2026-03-20), that are worth knowing about because they can effect how you approach programming and design your how programming languages. There are severeal hundred programming languages listed on Wikipedia, however they are all most all basically syntactical variations and combinations of each other. Therefore I've made an a small selection of tease, that cover everything the different programming languages offer except syntactical differences. This list aims to be as small as possible (while offering total coverage); I'm not claiming any of these are original, good, or bad, nor am I saying that there are other languages that are really good and worth learning.

Although Rust could be added to this list for offering resource lifetime contracts and borrow checking, I've excluded it from the list because it is just a specialisation of design by contract.