The amount of programming languages is endless. One suboptimal option to categorize them is by their history. The more elaborated attempt in building clusters is by a two variable model which contains of interpreted vs compiled and procedural vs. objectoriented. The interesting situation is, that all the existing languages can be located at a certain position in the 2d chart.
And secondly it is possible to name only the languages located on the four corner which are: Basic, Python, C++ and C. Each of these languages has in one variable the maximum value. For example, the Basic language is an interpreted language which is working with the procedural paradigm.
Let us determine the best programming languages for professional purposes. The interesting situation is, that even more than 200 different programming languages were invented, most of them are only used in an academic context. At the university lots of languages are taught, e.g. Pascal, Python and of course Prolog. But, most of these languages are not used for writing operating systems which includes applications for operating systems. The concern of expert prorammers against these academic languages is, that they are objectoriented which is equal to rreject them or they are interpreted which also implies to reject them. The only language which is not object oriented and not interpreted is C.
A closer look into the debian repository and into the anecdotal description of what is used for creating MS-Dos and Win16 bit application will show, that 100% of the software in the past was written in Ansi-C. This is especially the case for the early 1990s. According to the programming books of this time, the future is about object oriented programming namely C++, Delphi and Java, But at the same time, these languages were not used to write production ready sourcecode. But the programmers are prefering Ansi-C.
According to the picture it is very easy to explain the reason why. Professional programmers are prefering a language which is compiled and procedural at the same time. The only language available in this category is C. All the other languages like C++, Basic, Prolog, Lua and so on have a different self understanding.
The question which remains open is, why exactly professional software is written with compiled&procedural languages. It seems that only this combination ensures the maximum performance and the ability to maintain a larger amount of codelines. What the Linux sourcecode and the Windows sourcecode have in common is, that the project has over 1 million lines of code and that the binary file is executed very efficient.