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All computers in the world work in the same way: a series of 0's and 1's representing commands and data to be processed. However, it is not so easy to program directly in machine language . Higher-level programming languages were therefore born to allow abstracting computer programming and bringing development closer to models that are easier to understand by programmers .
Over the decades, many programming languages have been created, and even today the creative process has not stopped! Each of these languages refers to a specific model or solves in a different way a particular problem possibly introduced by a previous language.
In the last 10 years during which I have been working as Tech Community Manager , I have dealt with many developers who preferred one programming language rather than another and I have attended many meetups, evening meetings organized by programmers united by the desire to share the passion for their favorite programming language.
Even during the period of Covid-19 that we are experiencing, the meetings continued online as, for example, we did with the " Dev Community Night " promoted by Talent Garden Innovation School which saw me active at the forefront with the fixed appointments on Thursday evening which, after the summer break in August, also resume in September.
What is the programming language to focus on?
Below, here's what they replied to me, broken down into a 10-point list.
1. Python
print ("Hello, world!")Python is now 30 years old! Its creator, Dutch Guido van Rossum , started working on it in the late 1980s and the language was released publicly in 1991. It owes its name to its inventor's passion for Monty Python and their television series Monty Python's Flying Circus, aired on the BBC during the 1970s. Python development is currently managed by the non-profit organization Python Software Foundation with the help of the huge international community of developers. Python is a high-level, open-source programming language and has thousands of libraries and frameworks. Although Python is usually considered an interpreted language, in reality the source code first passes through a pre-compilation phase in bytecode , which is almost always reused after the first execution of the program, thus avoiding reinterpreting the source each time and improving the performance. Furthermore, it is a cross-platform language ; in fact, the code can run on any platform that has an interpreter. It is a simple language to learn and use. The intention of its creator was, in fact, that it be an immediately understandable language. It comes with an extremely rich library, which together with automatic memory management and robust exception handling make it one of the richest and most comfortable languages to program with. It is used in many contexts: from the desktop to the web, from video game development to system scripting . It is also considered one of the best programming languages for Machine Learning . It is strongly supported by Facebook , Amazon and especially by Google . Official website: https://www.python.org/
2. JavaScript
<script type = "text / javascript"> alert ('Hello world'); </script>JavaScript , often abbreviated to JS , is a high-level interpreted language, which is part of the scripting languages . It was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications on commission from the same company in order to create a language to be integrated into your browser that would allow you to extend its functionality in a simple and, above all, rapid way. First named Mochan and later LiveScript , it was only later renamed JavaScript due to the partnership with Sun Microsystems which was launching Java . In fact, in 1995 Netscape had decided to equip its browser with a scripting language that would allow web designers to interact with the different objects on the page (images, forms, links, etc.), but above all with Java applets . The two companies in December of '95 announced the birth of this new language. Standardized for the first time in 1997 by ECMA under the name ECMAScript, it is also an ISO standard . Microsoft did not wait and responded with VBScript within Internet Explorer and creating its own version of JavaScriptcalled JScript which was the version of Internet Explorer JavaScript : we are in July 1996. JavaScript achieved great success among developers and web designers not for the interaction with Java applets such as Netscape and Sun Microsystems they would have liked but for the use made by the developers who introduced dynamic effects in the web pages triggered by the interaction through the scripts user via mouse, keyboard, page loading, etc. Today, along with HTML and CSS , JavaScript is one of the most important technologies on the web and all major browsers have their own dedicated JavaScript engine . Additionally, JavaScript engines , originally only used in browsers, now also run on servers, via Node.js for example, and in a variety of applications built with frameworks like Electron and Cordova . Thanks to the proliferation of libraries and frameworks , JavaScript has become a very popular language,multiplatform and after so many years it is experiencing a new youth! Official website: www.ecmascript.org
3. C #
using System;
class HelloWorldApp { public static void Main (string [] args) { Console.WriteLine ("Hello World"); Console.ReadLine (); } }C # (pronounced “ C Sharp ”) is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft within the .NET framework. It was later approved as an ECMA standard and is also an ISO standard . Its creator James Gosling , as well as Bill Joy of Sun Microsystem , called it an imitation of Java , while, according to principal designer Anders Hejsberg , the Danish computer scientist who previously developed the languages Turbo Pascal and Borland Delphi , the structure of C # is closer to that of the C ++ language . Its provisional name was “ Cool ”, acronym for “ C-like Object Oriented Language “, but at the official presentation of the .NET project at the Professional Developers Conference held in July 2000 in Orlando, it was presented as C # . At the same conference it was added support C # to libraries and runtime for ASP.NET . The C # language is suitable for writing applications for Windows , for developing Web pages , Android applications and for Embedded systems . It is also used in Unity to develop video games. A curiosity: the name of the language, C Sharp , is inspired by musical notation. The sharp symbol ( ♯ ) is an alteration, in an increasing sense, of the pitch of the note to which it refers; that is written to the left of a note makes it higher by a semitone. Official website: docs.microsoft.com/it-it/dotnet/csharp
4. Typescript
let message: string = "Hello World" console.log (message)TypeScript is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft that can be used to develop both client and server JavaScript applications (thanks to Node.js ). It is a superset of JavaScript that is, it extends the syntax of the latter to provide the developer with those characteristics of modern programming languages that allow the design of complex JavaScript applications in an easier way. All JavaScript code can be used as TypeScript . You can start with pure JavaScript and gradually migrate your code to use the features of TypeScript . TypeScript compiles into JavaScript . You can even decide which version of JavaScript the TypeScript compiler should produce. The advantage is that you can use all the modern language features in your applications and support older browsers at the same time . Some JavaScript purists seem to resist it while those from other languages, like Java and C #, seem to love it. TypeScript is becoming more and more popular to such an extent that it is in the Top ten in the most recent “ StackOverflow Developer Survey ”. For an old Delphi developer like me, it's great that Anders Hejlsberg - the dad of Turbo Pascal and Delphi - who is also the creator of C # is actively working on this language . Official website: www.typescriptlang.org
5. Go
package main import "fmt" func main () { fmt.Printf ("Hello, World \ n") }Go - also called GoLang - is an open-source programming language developed by Google starting in 2007 and officially released in 2009. Its creators, Robert Griesemer , Rob Pike and Ken Thompson of Google , wanted to create a language with a very clear initial philosophy: cleanliness, simplicity, practicality and clarity. As Rob Pike said in a 2012 talk, “ Go is a language developed by Google to try to solve Google's problems , and Google needs to solve big problems… The main purpose for which Go was created is to reduce slowness. software development in Google and consequently making processes more productive and scalable ”. Go has only a few dozen keywords and can be learned in one day. It natively compiles into machine code , no virtual machines are needed and it is not interpreted. It is therefore very fast and efficient. Compilers are available for all major operating systems. The syntax resembles that of C except for the type declaration and the lack of parentheses for the for and if loops . Memory management is entrusted to a garbage collector . Some of the most successful projects currently used in the IT world such as Docker and Kubernetes are written in Go . Google, Amazon, AT&T, Facebook, IBM, Netflix, Zalando and many other companies use it for projects in production. Go's mascot is a particular North American rodent species called the Gopher . Official website: www.golang.org
6. Java
class HelloWorld { public static void main (String [] args) { System.out.println ("Hello World"); } }Java is a high-level, object-oriented programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) software platform created to make the language independent of the hardware it runs on. The dawn of Java as a programming language dates back to the early 1990s from research work at Stanford University. But let's go by steps: in '92 the Oak language ("oak") was born, produced by Sun Microsystems and created by a group of developers led by James Gosling but it was soon necessary to change the name to Java as Oak was already a language of programming. Its basic syntax was made very similar to that of C ++ , which was in vogue in those years, to make the adoption of Java more attractive to programmers. In 1993, with the explosion of the Internet , Java began to get noticed, in fact Netscape announced the choice to equip its then famous browser with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This marked the beginning of a new era because thanks to applets web pages became interactive. Java was officially announced in '95 at the SunWorld conference with the motto “ Write Once, Run Anywhere ” which is one of the fundamental principles of the language. In 2006 Sun Microsystems distributed the compiler and the JVM under the GPL license and the following year also the libraries making Java an open-source programming language . It is said that its name is associated with coffee as its creators often found themselves drinking a cup to talk about the project - Java is a quality of coffee from Indonesia - while an unconfirmed legend reveals that the name of the language is l 'acronym for “ Just Another Vacuum Acronym ”, an ironic reference to the proliferation of abbreviations used in the IT field. After so many years, today, it still remains one of the most used programming languages in the world. Official website: www.java.com
7. Dart
main () { print ('Hello World!'); }Dart , formerly called Dash , is an open-source , object-oriented and general-purpose programming language developed by Google . It was first presented in 2011 at the GOTO programmers conference in Denmark. The stated purpose was to replace JavaScript , to solve all those problems that cannot be solved with the evolution of the language, while offering, at the same time, better performance, better productivity in large projects and better security features. The Dart compiler allows you to write programs for the web but also for desktops and servers; in fact, it can compile in both JavaScript and native code . The Virtual Machine of Dart was supposed to be integrated directly into the Chrome browser as early as 2011 but in 2015 Google gave it up in favor of compiling in JavaScript . Many developers only became interested in Dart when Flutter became established . Flutter is a mobile app SDK , complete with frameworks, widgets and tools, that offers developers a way to build and deploy native mobile apps for Android and iOS , written in Dart . Beyond Google , companies like Alibaba, Adobe, MailChimp, and JetBrains are using this language in production. Official website: www.dart.dev
8. Rust
fn main () { println! ("Hello, world!"); }Rust is an open-source programming language for systems that focuses on speed, security and parallelism. The language was created by Graydon Hoare , a Mozilla employee , and since 2010 its development is supported directly by the Mozilla Foundation . Even if it is a very young language it already seems very mature. As it stands out on the official website, Rust is “ the language that empowers everyone to create reliable and efficient software ”! There is no need for a low-level background to write efficient and reliable programs. Rust is incredibly fast and memory efficient: without runtime or garbage collector , it can be used for performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and integrate easily with other languages. Many developers are using Rust to create a wide range of new software applications such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, virtual reality simulation engines. Mozilla itself uses Rust for Servo, its web browser engine , and core parts of Firefox . Furthermore, it is also used in production by Dropbox, npm, Postmates, Braintree and many other companies. Rust uses a package manager called Cargo . Like npm in JavaScript or Ruby Gems , Cargo allows you to get and compile everything you need for your projects: it is used to create a new project in Rust as well as to check for errors, compile and manage dependencies. One final curiosity: Rust's compiler , rustc , was compiled by itself! Official website: www.rust-lang.org
9. Swift
import UIKit
print ("Hello, world!")Swift was developed for 4 years in secret, no one knew of its existence outside of Apple. It then made its first appearance at WWDC - Apple's developer conference - in 2014. Apple's intention was for a new language for macOS, iOS and its ecosystem. Today Swift is an open-source and general-purpose language that has quickly gained popularity and contributions from the programming community . It is developed to coexist with the Objective-C language , already widely used on Apple systems , simplifying code writing. Created by Chris Lattner , with the contribution of many other Apple programmers , it is inspired by other programming languages such as Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C # and many others. In 2016 Apple released a free iPad application , Swift Playgrounds , which allows especially young people, thanks to simple and intuitive graphics, to quickly start learning to program in Swift . Official website: www.swift.org
10. Kotlin
fun main () { println ("Hello World") }At Google I / O - Google's developer conference - in May 2017, Google announced that it would begin supporting a new language for developing on Android . It was Kotlin , created by JetBrains , the software company behind the most popular Java IDE , IntelliJ IDEA . Since 2019, Kotlin has been Google's recommended language for developing Android applications . It appears, in fact, as the first option in the Android Studio IDE . At JetBrains the developers were tired of Java's verbiage . They wanted a compatible but more concise language. When they started working on Kotlin they decided to make it open-source and the language benefited immensely thanks to the support of the large Java community . Development began in 2011 and the language is named after the island of the same name near St. Petersburg. Kotlin is based on the Java Virtual Machine , it is oriented towards object-oriented programming but also functional programming, it is inspired and takes cues from other languages such as Scala , Java itself but also from Pascal and modern Go and F # . As stated Andrey Breslav , project leader, Kotlin was created to be fully operational with the Java environment and its huge ecosystem, overcoming its limitations and criticalities. In addition to running on JVM environments, the compiler is able to generate JavaScript code, can compile directly into machine code on supported systems and can be used for any type of server, client and Android development . Official website: www.kotlinlang.org -
Innocent Sansone
I have been programming since I was a child, when my parents gave me a Commodore 16. Over 15 years ago, one of the first in Italy, I started working as a Community Manager in the Tech field for an important multinational in the sector. Continuing this work with other companies, I have created and supported many Dev Communities, I have conceived and organized hundreds of technical events, I have directed Tech Community programs and departments. Today, as a freelancer, I dialogue with thousands of developers, technology professionals and enthusiasts, startups, companies, communities and associations. I continue to deal with Community by managing Public Relations (with the direct network - its own community - and the indirect network - all the others), organizing online and live events, devising new formats, dealing with Communication and Marketing specific for the Community, supporting in the development of products and services aimed at enhancing the interaction with their public. Find me on www.innosans.it, see you soon!
Article updated on: 09 August 2023
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