It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars? This is worth thinking about not so much because we'll actually get to use these languages as because, if we're lucky, we'll use languages on the path from this point to that. I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language. I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, "How can you say that Java won't turn out to be a successful language? It's already a successful language." And I admit that it is, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it (particularly individual books on it), or by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job. When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol. This is just a guess. I may be wrong. My point here is not to dis Java, but to raise the issue of evolutionary trees and get people asking, where on the tree is language X? The reason to ask this question isn't just so that our ghosts can say, in a hundred years, I told you so. It's because staying close to the main branches is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will be good to program in now. At any given time, you're probably happiest on the main branches of an evolutionary tree. Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals, it must have sucked to be one. The Cro-Magnons would have been constantly coming over and beating you up and stealing your food. The reason I want to know what languages will be like in a hundred years is so that I know what branch of the tree to bet on now. The evolution of languages differs from the evolution of species because branches can converge. The Fortran branch, for example, seems to be merging with the descendants of Algol. In theory this is possible for species too, but it's not likely to have happened to any bigger than a cell. Convergence is more likely for languages partly because the space of possibilities is smaller, and partly because mutations are not random. Language designers deliberately incorporate ideas from other languages. It's especially useful for language designers to think about where the evolution of programming languages is likely to lead, because they can steer accordingly. In that case, "stay on a main branch" becomes more than a way to choose a good language. It becomes a heuristic for making the right decisions about language design. Any programming language can be divided into two parts: some set of fundamental operators that play the role of axioms, and the rest of the language, which could in principle be written in terms of these fundamental operators. I think the fundamental operators are the most important factor in a language's long term survival. The rest you can change. It's like the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all. Everything else you can fix later, but you can't fix the location. I think it's important not just that the axioms be well chosen, but that there be few of them. Mathematicians have always felt this way about axioms-- the fewer, the better-- and I think they're onto something. At the very least, it has to be a useful exercise to look closely at the core of a language to see if there are any axioms that could be weeded out. I've found in my long career as a slob that cruft breeds cruft, and I've seen this happen in software as well as under beds and in the corners of rooms. I have a hunch that the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the smallest, cleanest cores. The more of a language you can write in itself, the better. Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will be like in a hundred years. Will we even be writing programs in a hundred years? Won't we just tell computers what we want them to do? There hasn't been a lot of progress in that department so far. My guess is that a hundred years from now people will still tell computers what to do using programs we would recognize as such. There may be tasks that we solve now by writing programs and which in a hundred years you won't have to write programs to solve, but I think there will still be a good deal of programming of the type that we do today. It may seem presumptuous to think anyone can predict what any technology will look like in a hundred years. But remember that we already have almost fifty years of history behind us. Looking forward a hundred years is a graspable idea when we consider how slowly languages have evolved in the past fifty. Languages evolve slowly because they're not really technologies. Languages are notation. A program is a formal description of the problem you want a computer to solve for you. So the rate of evolution in programming languages is more like the rate of evolution in mathematical notation than, say, transportation or communications. Mathematical notation does evolve, but not with the giant leaps you see in technology. Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years, it seems safe to predict they will be much faster than they are now. If Moore's Law continues to put out, they will be 74 quintillion (73,786,976,294,838,206,464) times faster. That's kind of hard to imagine. And indeed, the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that Moore's Law will stop working. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of fundamental limit eventually. But I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much faster. Even if they only end up being a paltry million times faster, that should change the ground rules for programming languages substantially. Among other things, there will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code. And yet some applications will still demand speed. Some of the problems we want to solve with computers are created by computers; for example, the rate at which you have to process video images depends on the rate at which another computer can generate them. And there is another class of problems which inherently have an unlimited capacity to soak up cycles: image rendering, cryptography, simulations. If some applications can be increasingly inefficient while others continue to demand all the speed the hardware can deliver, faster computers will mean that languages have to cover an ever wider range of efficiencies. We've seen this happening already. Current implementations of some popular new languages are shockingly wasteful by the standards of previous decades. This isn't just something that happens with programming languages. It's a general historical trend. As technologies improve, each generation can do things that the previous generation would have considered wasteful. People thirty years ago would be astonished at how casually we make long distance phone calls. People a hundred years ago would be even more astonished that a package would one day travel from Boston to New York via Memphis. I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the next hundred years. They're nearly all going to be wasted. I learned to program when computer power was scarce. I can remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs so they would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80. The thought of all this stupendously inefficient software burning up cycles doing the same thing over and over seems kind of gross to me. But I think my intuitions here are wrong. I'm like someone who grew up poor, and can't bear to spend money even for something important, like going to the doctor. Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is. There's good waste, and bad waste. I'm interested in good waste-- the kind where, by spending more, we can get simpler designs. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware? The desire for speed is so deeply engrained in us, with our puny computers, that it will take a conscious effort to overcome it. In language design, we should be consciously seeking out situations where we can trade efficiency for even the smallest increase in convenience. Most data structures exist because of speed. For example, many languages today have both strings and lists. Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization. If we think of the core of a language as a set of axioms, surely it's gross to have additional axioms that add no expressive power, simply for the sake of efficiency. Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it. The right way to solve that problem, I think, is to separate the meaning of a program from the implementation details. Instead of having both lists and strings, have just lists, with some way to give the compiler optimization advice that will allow it to lay out strings as contiguous bytes if necessary. Since speed doesn't matter in most of a program, you won't ordinarily need to bother with this sort of micromanagement. This will be more and more true as computers get faster. Saying less about implementation should also make programs more flexible. Specifications change while a program is being written, and this is not only inevitable, but desirable. The word "essay" comes from the French verb "essayer", which means "to try". An essay, in the original sense, is something you write to try to figure something out. This happens in software too. I think some of the best programs were essays, in the sense that the authors didn't know when they started exactly what they were trying to write. Lisp hackers already know about the value of being flexible with data structures. We tend to write the first version of a program so that it does everything with lists. These initial versions can be so shockingly inefficient that it takes a conscious effort not to think about what they're doing, just as, for me at least, eating a steak requires a conscious effort not to think where it came from. What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of all, is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program with the least possible effort. At least, that's how we'd describe it in present-day terms. What they'll say is that they want a language that's easy to program in. Inefficient software isn't gross. What's gross is a language that makes programmers do needless work. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster. I think getting rid of strings is already something we could bear to think about. We did it in , and it seems to be a win; some operations that would be awkward to describe as regular expressions can be described easily as recursive functions. How far will this flattening of data structures go? I can think of possibilities that shock even me, with my conscientiously broadened mind. Will we get rid of arrays, for example? After all, they're just a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of integers. Will we replace hash tables themselves with lists? There are more shocking prospects even than that. The Lisp that McCarthy described in 1960, for example, didn't have numbers. Logically, you don't need to have a separate notion of numbers, because you can represent them as lists: the integer n could be represented as a list of n elements. You can do math this way. It's just unbearably inefficient. No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in practice. In fact, McCarthy's 1960 paper was not, at the time, intended to be implemented at all. It was a , an attempt to create a more elegant alternative to the Turing Machine. When someone did, unexpectedly, take this paper and translate it into a working Lisp interpreter, numbers certainly weren't represented as lists; they were represented in binary, as in every other language. Could a programming language go so far as to get rid of numbers as a fundamental data type? I ask this not so much as a serious question as as a way to play chicken with the future. It's like the hypothetical case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object-- here, an unimaginably inefficient implementation meeting unimaginably great resources. I don't see why not. The future is pretty long. If there's something we can do to decrease the number of axioms in the core language, that would seem to be the side to bet on as t approaches infinity. If the idea still seems unbearable in a hundred years, maybe it won't in a thousand. Just to be clear about this, I'm not proposing that all numerical calculations would actually be carried out using lists. I'm proposing that the core language, prior to any additional notations about implementation, be defined this way. In practice any program that wanted to do any amount of math would probably represent numbers in binary, but this would be an optimization, not part of the core language semantics. Another way to burn up cycles is to have many layers of software between the application and the hardware. This too is a trend we see happening already: many recent languages are compiled into byte code. Bill Woods once told me that, as a rule of thumb, each layer of interpretation costs a factor of 10 in speed. This extra cost buys you flexibility. The very first version of Arc was an extreme case of this sort of multi-level slowness, with corresponding benefits. It was a classic "metacircular" interpreter written on top of Common Lisp, with a definite family resemblance to the eval function defined in McCarthy's original Lisp paper. The whole thing was only a couple hundred lines of code, so it was very easy to understand and change. The Common Lisp we used, CLisp, itself runs on top of a byte code interpreter. So here we had two levels of interpretation, one of them (the top one) shockingly inefficient, and the language was usable. Barely usable, I admit, but usable. Writing software as multiple layers is a powerful technique even within applications. Bottom-up programming means writing a program as a series of layers, each of which serves as a language for the one above. This approach tends to yield smaller, more flexible programs. It's also the best route to that holy grail, reusability. A language is by definition reusable. The more of your application you can push down into a language for writing that type of application, the more of your software will be reusable. Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness. Consider libraries: they're reusable because they're language, whether they're written in an object-oriented style or not. I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. imposes constraining caste restrictions. In any academic field there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren't. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than how important it is for getting good results. The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it. Though the situation is better in the sciences, the overlap between the kind of work you're allowed to do and the kind of work that yields good languages is distressingly small. (Olin Shivers has grumbled eloquently about this.) For example, types seem to be an inexhaustible source of research papers, despite the fact that static typing seems to preclude true macros-- without which, in my opinion, no language is worth using. The trend is not merely toward languages being developed as open-source projects rather than "research", but toward languages being designed by the application programmers who need to use them, rather than by compiler writers. This seems a good trend and I expect it to continue. Unlike physics in a hundred years, which is almost necessarily impossible to predict, I think it may be possible in principle to design a language now that would appeal to users in a hundred years. One way to design a language is to just write down the program you'd like to be able to write, regardless of whether there is a compiler that can translate it or hardware that can run it. When you do this you can assume unlimited resources. It seems like we ought to be able to imagine unlimited resources as well today as in a hundred years. What program would one like to write? Whatever is least work. Except not quite: whatever least work if your ideas about programming weren't already influenced by the languages you're currently used to. Such influence can be so pervasive that it takes a great effort to overcome it. You'd think it would be obvious to creatures as lazy as us how to express a program with the least effort. In fact, our ideas about what's possible tend to be so by whatever language we think in that easier formulations of programs seem very surprising. They're something you have to discover, not something you naturally sink into. One helpful trick here is to use the of the program as an approximation for how much work it is to write. Not the length in characters, of course, but the length in distinct syntactic elements-- basically, the size of the parse tree. It may not be quite true that the shortest program is the least work to write, but it's close enough that you're better off aiming for the solid target of brevity than the fuzzy, nearby one of least work. Then the algorithm for language design becomes: look at a program and ask, is there any way to write this that's shorter? In practice, writing programs in an imaginary hundred-year language will work to varying degrees depending on how close you are to the core. Sort routines you can write now. But it would be hard to predict now what kinds of libraries might be needed in a hundred years. Presumably many libraries will be for domains that don't even exist yet. If SETI@home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. Unless of course they are sufficiently advanced that they already communicate in XML. At the other extreme, I think you might be able to design the core language today. In fact, some might argue that it was already mostly designed in 1958. If the hundred year language were available today, would we want to program in it? One way to answer this question is to look back. If present-day programming languages had been available in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use them? In some ways, the answer is no. Languages today assume infrastructure that didn't exist in 1960. For example, a language in which indentation is significant, like Python, would not work very well on printer terminals. But putting such problems aside-- assuming, for example, that programs were all just written on paper-- would programmers of the 1960s have liked writing programs in the languages we use now? I think so. Some of the less imaginative ones, who had artifacts of early languages built into their ideas of what a program was, might have had trouble. (How can you manipulate data without doing pointer arithmetic? How can you implement flow charts without gotos?) But I think the smartest programmers would have had no trouble making the most of present-day languages, if they'd had them. If we had the hundred-year language now, it would at least make a great pseudocode. What about using it to write software? Since the hundred-year language will need to generate fast code for some applications, presumably it could generate code efficient enough to run acceptably well on our hardware. We might have to give more optimization advice than users in a hundred years, but it still might be a net win. Now we have two ideas that, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: (1) the hundred-year language could, in principle, be designed today, and (2) such a language, if it existed, might be good to program in today. When you see these ideas laid out like that, it's hard not to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language now? When you're working on language design, I think it is good to have such a target and to keep it consciously in mind. When you learn to drive, one of the principles they teach you is to align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted on the road, but by aiming at some point in the distance. Even if all you care about is what happens in the next ten feet, this is the right answer. I think we can and should do the same thing with programming languages. I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the first language to embody the principle that declarations (except those of dynamic variables) were merely optimization advice, and would not change the meaning of a correct program. Common Lisp seems to have been the first to state this explicitly. to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Dan Giffin for reading drafts of this, and to Guido van Rossum, Jeremy Hylton, and the rest of the Python crew for inviting me to speak at PyCon. |
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Considering a career as a developer?
The first step is deciding which programming language to learn. Programming languages allow developers to tell computers what to do. Each language comes with its own advantages, and many of their functions overlap. And with over 600 languages to choose from, it can be hard to figure where to start.
The good news is, there are a few languages that stand out amongst developers as go-tos for beginners. So, to make your decision a little easier, let’s explore 11 of the easiest programming languages to learn.
Just about everyone has heard of HTML , yet you may be surprised to learn that it’s known as a controversial programming language. That’s because HTML is technically a markup language — HTML stands for “hypertext markup language.” What’s the difference? Essentially, HTML isn’t capable of the basic functions of other programming languages, such as logic building, conditional statements, or even basic mathematical operations.
But just because you can’t create an IF-ELSE statement doesn’t mean you won’t be glad you dedicated time to learning HTML . As a markup language, HTML is the Internet’s standard language for structuring web pages and displaying text.
HTML is known for its extensive use of tags or labels that define what kind of text should be on the page. For example, the body text in this article would start with a <body> tag and end with a </body> tag. HTML tags define almost everything about the text on a web page, from font size to hyperlinks.
Anyone who works with web pages should know HTML. This includes Front-End Engineers and Full-Stack Engineers . And, if you enjoy fine-tuning websites, then learning HTML will allow the most customization and let you go beyond pre-designed templates.
Because it’s so popular, there’s no shortage of HTML courses to get you started. The language itself is fairly simple, and HTML tags follow consistent rules that make it easy to learn new commands and functions.
If HTML defines the content of your webpage, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used for defining the look of each HTML element . All of the different frames you see on a web page, including text boxes, background images, and menus, are coded in CSS.
Have you ever noticed how the same web page is organized differently when you’re viewing it on your phone versus on your desktop? That’s because CSS also controls which page elements are visible or hidden depending on the screen size and resolution.
CSS is a rule-based language, which means you define how different kinds of text and pages look by applying rules to each type of group defined in HTML. For example, you can use CSS to make all hyperlinks underlined in hot pink, while all level 2 headers are bolded and green. So, while CSS and HTML are used independently, the two languages complement each other to create web pages with customized content and style.
Like HTML, CSS isn’t considered to be a full programming language, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming part of the unstoppable trio of web page languages.
Because it works so closely with HTML, CSS is a must-know for Front-End Engineers as well as Full-Stack Engineers .
A basic CSS course will teach you the language’s fundamentals as you customize web pages. But if you’re interested in more advanced CSS functions, there are plenty of CSS templates and frameworks available — that is, pre-written CSS code that produces a certain page style and color scheme.
Since HTML and CSS can’t directly incorporate conditional statements and other decision-making functions, they aren’t considered complete programming languages. But what happens if you do want an interactive web page? For example, what if you want to add a drop-down menu or a button that changes color and text when your mouse hovers over it? Enter: JavaScript .
As a full programming language, JavaScript is used to handle programming loops and make logical decisions based on input, such as when you hover your mouse over a menu or when you type something into a search box. And because JavaScript can output HTML and CSS code, it’s able to make web pages interactive and dynamic.
But that’s not all JavaScript can do. Through project environments like Node.js , it’s possible to run JavaScript outside of a web browser and on the back end . This allows web applications to run using a single programming language from the screen to the server.
As the third of the web page design trio of languages, Front-End Engineers and Full-Stack Engineers should master JavaScript along with HTML and CSS. Also, since it’s functional on the server-side with environments like Node.js, Back-End Engineers can benefit from learning JavaScript too.
While it’s more involved than HTML and CSS, JavaScript is one of the easiest true programming languages to learn. It’s an interpreted language and can easily be embedded with languages like HTML. Another thing that makes JavaScript easy to learn is that you can write complex snippets of code and test them in the web browser as you go. Also, if you already know HTML and CSS, then you’ll have a head start in learning JavaScript .
We can’t keep talking about easy programming languages without addressing the giant snake in the room. Python is consistently ranked as one of the most popular programming languages, and for good reason. From its conception in the 1980s, Python was designed to be a highly readable code that could be easily extended with modules well into the future.
People also really like Python because it’s a multi-paradigm programming language. This means that it supports different styles (paradigms) of programming. This includes object-oriented programming , which focuses on manipulating datasets (or objects ), as well as functional programming — which focuses on using functions to perform complex or multi-step operations.
Python is a widely used application language, and you’ll find Web Developers using it for websites, applications, and games. At the same time, Data Scientists use Python because the language works well with retrieving and analyzing large datasets.
It’s not often that a programming language is invented specifically with readability in mind. As you learn Python , you’ll discover that not only is everything meant to be simple, but complex code is frowned upon. Alex Martelli, a Python Software Foundation Fellow, puts it best: “To describe something as ‘clever’ is not considered a compliment in Python culture.”
Since it first appeared in 1993, R has become the go-to programming language for anyone interested in statistical analysis, data science, or data mining. While R is usually accessed through a command-line prompt, there are plenty of graphical interfaces available. Some of them allow people to use basic R functions without needing to learn any R code, which is one reason why the language is so popular.
R is open source, which means it’s free to use for personal or commercial purposes. This also means that there are thousands of user-created downloadable packages that provide functions well beyond the original code.
Some packages are for general functions, like data visualization. But most are designed for very specific professional functions, which is why R is so widely used . There’s an R package out there to fit your needs, whether you’re interested in general statistics, genetic sequencing, geospatial analysis, or anything in between.
Another strength of R is the knitr engine, which can produce dynamic, publication-ready reports and web pages that integrate R code with LaTeX, HTML, or Markdown.
R is most popular among Data Scientists, Data Analysts , and Statisticians. But, more and more STEM professionals are drawn to R because of the many packages designed specifically for their fields and, sometimes, specifically for their companies.
At first glance, learning R might seem like a challenge as the language can take some getting used to, especially if you’re already familiar with other programming languages. But one reason why learning R is easier than other languages is because every R function comes with extensive documentation that includes explanations of each argument as well as example commands.
What do you call a Perl with a Lisp? A Ruby, of course! Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, set out to create a language that incorporated the best elements of Perl, Lisp, Smalltalk, Ada, and Eiffel. And that’s how Ruby was born.
Compared to Python, which focuses on providing a single, simple solution for every problem, Ruby aims to allow multiple approaches that achieve the same end. This gives Ruby a sort of flexibility that programmers love.
Another reason why Ruby is so popular is that programmers can change even fundamental parts of the language to suit your needs. For example, if you prefer your mathematical operators to be spelled out instead of using symbols (“plus” instead of “+”), you can define that in Ruby.
Like Python, Ruby is a general-purpose language that’s especially popular with Web Developers, since it’s most commonly used to build web applications. But, you can also use Ruby for web scraping, command-line tools, automation, data processing, and more.
Once you start learning Ruby , you’ll soon understand why it’s called the “language of careful balance.” And, because so many developers use and love it, you’ll find no shortage of Ruby documentation, community forums, and sample code available online.
One of the biggest advantages of Java is that it was originally designed to run in distributed environments like the Internet. That is, among multiple servers and computers. And, even though the language is old, Java is still relevant and cutting edge due to constant testing and updating.
Java developers can be confident that creating a Java application on one platform means that the application will work on all other major platforms too. The language’s flexibility also means that developers can use it not just on computers and mobile devices, but also in gateways, consumer products, or practically any electronic device.
Finally, Java is known for its reliability and security, which is yet another reason that developers are so attracted to it.
Not surprisingly, Java is a favorite among Front-End Engineers and Full-Stack Engineers. It’s also one of the first languages that Computer Scientists learn as an introduction to object-oriented programming.
Learning Java is especially easy because its syntax is similar to English. Plus, you can count on a large support community to provide guidance and answer your questions as you learn Java.
We’ve focused so far on programming languages that help with front-end and application development, but Back-End Engineers have their favorite programming languages too — and PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is one of them. This language is widely used within HTML to quickly access and manage server-side content, including databases . In fact, many online forms use PHP to create new database records or update existing ones.
Another advantage to PHP is the built-in security it provides, as it can encrypt data and restrict access to certain parts of your website.
Between the ease of use, wide functionality , and security features, it’s not surprising that major companies like WordPress and Facebook use PHP.
PHP is chiefly used to manage interaction with the server-side of a website, which is why it’s a staple programming language for Back-End Engineers as well as Full-Stack Engineers.
PHP is known for its simplicity and forgiving syntax. As you learn PHP , you’ll never be far from documentation and resources to help you along the way.
Go , or Golang, is a general-purpose programming language that Google originally developed as an alternative to C / C++ . The result was a language that combines the faster performance offered by C/C++ with a simplified syntax.
As an open-source programming language, Go is used on servers, DevOps, web development, and even command line tools, as well as a variety of applications, such as cloud and server-side applications.
Computer Scientists and Application Developers who need to quickly develop high-performing applications turn to Go as the best programming language to get the job done.
Go was designed with simplicity in mind, making it a beginner-friendly programming language. Check out our Learn Go course , created in partnership with Google, to get started with the language.
In 2014, Apple developed Swift as an alternative to Objective-C to use with macOS (MacBooks and iMacs) and iOS (iPhones and iPads). With its introduction, Swift presented many modern features that made programming significantly easier. Now, it’s the top choice of developers who build apps for Mac OSX, the Apple iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.
Swift is a must if you’re a Front-End Engineer or Full-Stack Engineer interested in developing apps within the Apple ecosystem.
As with all of its products and services, Apple put a lot of effort into making Swift as intuitive as possible. Apple-centric developers love Swift because it’s easy to read and write. And as you learn Swift , you can even download a free app, Swift Playgrounds , that allows you to develop and test your own Swift programs while you learn.
Just a few years after the first generation of smartphones, app developers realized that they needed a powerful and fast language. Enter JetBrains, the company that first released Kotlin in 2011.
Kotlin is specifically for mobile development on the Android operating system, and has become the preferred language for Android applications. While Kotlin is fully compatible with Java, one of the benefits of Kotlin is that it generally allows developers to write less code than they would have to in Java.
Any Front-End Engineer or Full-Stack Engineer who develops Android apps uses Kotlin.
In addition to being a beginner-friendly language, Kotlin is especially easy and quick to grasp if you already have knowledge of Java or Python. It’s also straight-forward for iOS developers to learn because it was built on the same modern concepts they already use. Get started learning the basics of Kotlin .
Are there a ton of programming languages out there that make developers’ lives easier? You bet. Do you need to learn them all? Absolutely not. Instead, we recommend focusing on a few languages that are most helpful in your chosen career.
Not sure where to start? Our free course Learn to Code with Blockly will introduce you to the basics of programming, and we also take a closer look at some of the best languages for beginners in Choosing a Programming Language . And in Choosing a Career in Tech , you can explore different careers in the field to get a sense of which path might be right for you.
You could also try taking our sorting quiz ! It’ll give you recommendations on which language is right for you. And our career paths include tailored course recommendations that take all the guesswork out of figuring out which programming languages help you be the most prepared to start your new career.
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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Computer Programming — A Comparison between the Two Programming Languages
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Published: Jun 5, 2019
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The most commonly used programming languages are Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Java and Php. The first most commonly used programming language is Hypertext Markup Language, or commonly known as HTML. HTML is the standard mark-up language used to create web pages. According to Shanon (2007), HTML is a language created for computer to read ...
Check these coding and programming essay topics: A comparative analysis of Java and C++ computer programming languages. The use of python programming language in modern technologies. Reasons why I have a passion for programming. The pros and cons of computer-assisted coding. Exploring computer coding as an art. Teaching coding to kids through ...
Python Programming Language Essay
What is Python? Executive Summary
A programming language is a set of English-like instructions that includes a set of rules for putting the instructions together to create commands. A translator changes the English-like commands into numeric code that the computer can understand. The most common type of translator is a compiler. The compiler is program that reads English-like ...
The first essay is about undefined parts of C. That essay, along with this primer on C obfuscation that I also found on Hacker News today, is enough to make anyone run screaming away from the language. And yet, in practice I don't run into any of these pitfalls and find writing C kinda pleasant. I have an atypical amount of freedom, and that ...
The attitude embodied in this essay is one of the things that has made the biggest difference to my effectiveness as an engineer: I approach software with a deep-seated belief that computers and software systems can be understood. …. In some ways, this belief feels radical today. Modern software and hardware systems contain almost ...
1. research and gather information, especially statistics from credible sources; 2. analyze how popular the programming language is and note the demand for PHP developers; 3. provide an unbiased overview of its perks and drawbacks and support it with examples; 4. identify the trends of using PHP in web development;
Java is the best programming language Essay. I consider Java as the best programming language due to its small language vocabulary, portability and simplicity. Java has a small and regular vocabulary; a programmer can easily master and grasp .Any computer program written in Java can run and execute on any operating system hence compatibility ...
A Python programming language essay refers to an essay that delves into the intricacies and applications of Python programming. It typically covers topics related to Python syntax, libraries, frameworks, and various use cases. Python essays serve as valuable resources for learners, enabling them to understand the language's concepts and ...
C++ Programming Language: [Essay Example], 708 words ...
An introduction to programming languages essay shows how these languages are instructions written to perform specific tasks. The most common examples of programming/coding languages are Ruby, Perl, COBOL, ALGOL, Python, Java, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, R, and PHP. Every essay about programming languages must also detail the common types of ...
Programming languages can either be compiled or interpreted; compiled languages are programs that are fully translated from source code to object code,... read full [Essay Sample] for free
The programming language generation is divided in 5 parts: 1 Generation programme language is Machine Language (or Binary) According to (Net industry, 2015) "First Generation is the lowest level of a computer language.". Computers were programmed by scientists using front control panels equipped with toggle switches in 1940s to 1950s.
The Hundred-Year Language. April 2003. (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.) It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that ...
Words: 503 | Page: 1 | 3 min read. Published: Jan 4, 2019. Python is an excessive-degree, interpreted, interactive and item-oriented scripting language. Python is designed to be especially readable. It uses English keywords regularly in which as different languages use punctuation, and it has fewer syntactical buildings than different languages.
What is Programming?
So, to make your decision a little easier, let's explore 11 of the easiest programming languages to learn. 1. HTML. Just about everyone has heard of HTML, yet you may be surprised to learn that it's known as a controversial programming language. That's because HTML is technically a markup language — HTML stands for "hypertext markup ...
In essay writing, this means refining your language and ensuring your argument is sound. In programming, this is similar to debugging the code and making improvements for better efficiency. Final Review: Finally, conduct a final review of your work. For essay writing, this includes proofreading and checking the formatting. For programming, it ...
A Comparison of Programming Languages: Php Vs Perl. Since several different programming language options are now accessible, it is not unusual that programmers find it difficult to make a choice. This is why this report has compiled information regarding two of the most renowned languages and has brought a comparison between the two competitors.
Programming Language Essays. Tools for Data Analytics. Introduction Data analysis and data science are increasingly essential for organizations to understand their data and make decisions. As such, data analysis tools are becoming increasingly crucial for businesses to access and analyze their data (Mohamed et al., 2020). These tools range from ...
Scheme: This is one of the lispy languages where recursion is more common, since the standard states that tail-recursive functions must use O (1) space, essentially turning it into a loop. As a result, this style of using tail-recursive functions is actually deemed as iterative (according to, e.g., SICP).