Programming by many programmers, would-be programmers, tech hobbyists and some netizens, is acclaimed to be somewhat difficult, so much so that some individuals interested in becoming programmers typically ask what the easier programming language is. When I wanted to learn software programming, I asked what the hardest one was and sort to learn it, for, at that time, I had two options, C# or java, I had more resources and mentors for C# than I did for java and here I am 😂.
I couldn't help but wonder again if C# is actually the hardest language to learn because the debate about the hardest language is one that might go on indefinitely. Evaluating the metric for defining how hard a language is, is probably the determining factor. I did however find an article on Medium that evaluated the complexity of programming languages based on the number of reserved words in those languages.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
Reserved words are words that have an assigned meaning or implementation that is unique to a programming language or is adopted by all programming languages. A reserved word is only used when one needs access to the assigned implementation. You can more or less say that reserved words are off-limits in the sense that if you use those words out of context, you'll get errors, bugs or the code won't run. A popular case was a woman whose name was "null".
"Null" is a reserved word that more or less means "nothing". As a result of that, she had issues getting registered on digital platforms because databases recognized her as "nothing" 😨. Below are the top 10 hardest languages (based on the number of reserved words).
F# (103)
C# (102)
C++ (93)
Swift (93)
Kotlin (78)
PHP (67)
Nim (66)
JavaScript (64)
Dart (56)
Haskell (55)
FINALLY
The number of reserved words in a language can be a good precursor for determining how challenging it would be to learn because those reserved words can be combined or can interact in a myriad of ways and developers have to learn most of them.