Mind your language
FORTRAN IV was the first-ever computer programming language I knew at SRKR Engineering College, Bhimavaram. It was part of our academic curriculum.
There used to be a handful of other programming languages too. BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, and later DBASE, Foxbase, Foxpro are to name a few.
It was not very clear to me why did those many languages exist. Friends used to argue as if one of them was superior to the other.
If we count them today, there are more than 5000 programming languages, though some of them are no longer in use.
How do you choose a language?
Before I answer this question, let me reveal a well-known secret! A language is as good as the audience. Each of these languages is meant for a specific environment. Let me present some of the most popular general-purpose programming languages.
C Language
The language celebrates its 50th anniversary next year. Yet, it is still the most popular programming language according to the TIOBE index. Most of the operating systems, embedded systems, and for that matter most of the system software is developed using C. It is a structured and procedural language with a strong affinity to the underlying platform.
Java
The battle for the top position has always been between C and Java since the 2000s. Java has been the de facto language of choice for web and enterprise software development. It is a general-purpose, object-oriented and typed programming language with support for functional programming, concurrent programming, reactive programming, and a few more! Frameworks like Spring are doing their best to keep it going!
Python
It has been a dark horse for a decade and finally claimed the position it deserves. In the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Data Sciences, even non-programmers find it easy to code using Python. It is also a general-purpose dynamically typed language with support to most of the modern programming paradigms. No wonder if it surpasses Java in the near future. The frameworks like Django, Flask, and the ML libraries like Tensorflow, Numpy are the main reasons for its popularity.
Javascript
OMG! The story of Javascript is no less interesting than that of any epic hero. It started as a humble scripting language in the late nineties. Today it powers every web user interface. Surprisingly it even powers some of the critical servers as well. And wait, did I say that it is the most preferred language to develop the so-called lambda functions on the cloud? Javascript, or ECMAScript, is a dynamically typed language with support for functional, object-oriented, modular, asynchronous, and event-driven programming approaches. Some of the popular tools & frameworks include Nodejs, Reactjs, and Angular.
C++ and C#
In the early 2000s, C++ was a very popular programming language. Many programmers of that day crossed over to object-oriented programming with the help of C++. And the C# carried the legacy of C++ besides supporting most of the modern programming practices. Every serious game that you see today is powered by these two languages. Also, C# is the language of choice on Azure.
And
PHP is used in web development, R is used in statistical computing, Go is used in systems development, SQL is used for querying the databases, Groovy (a flavour of Java) is used in test automation, Scala (a flavor of Java) is used in concurrent & distributed computing, Kotlin (again a flavor of Java) is used in Android and let me stop here!
There are still more niche languages like Ruby, Julia, Rust, Haskel, and many more!
Lets come back to the original question. How do you choose a language?
Well, probably it is clear by now that the choice of the language depends on what you are trying to develop. And the question of support, eco-system and other things adds to it.
And believe me, the days for monolingual developers are numbered. You should be a polyglot! Good luck!
