10 Programming Languages: Pros and Cons

Long gone are the times where there were few programming languages. Nowadays, we have a long list to choose a programming language from. Today I will walk you through some of the most well-known programming languages, their use cases and their history.

1. Python

Python is a very popular programming language in the IT field. It allows for fast prototyping and, for the most part good enough performance. It is an interpreted language, making it very versatile and easy to run. This programming language was invented in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum. One of the most important features of Python is that it has “batteries included”, meaning that if something is not covered by its extensive standard library, chances are that there is a package that implements that. This fact, combined with the ease of use and readability makes it a top contender in the ranks of the most popular programming languages.

2. JavaScript

Even though it has “Java” in its name, this programming is a lot different than Java and it is not affiliated in any means. This language is the tool you will use for websites. It integrates every website along side HTML and CSS and, from Single Page Applications to regular pages, you will need JavaScript to interact with the user. Nowadays, JavaScript (or JS for short) is used not only in the Frontend but also on the Backend. Since the raise of frameworks like NodeJS, this language has become an essential tool for every programmer that aspires to develop frontend applications. JavaScript allows for a high level of interactivity and responsiveness due to its nature, however it can be quite difficult to debug as it lacks strong typing features.

3. Java

Java has its origins in 1991 by the hand of Jams Gosling, Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton. It had several names, starting with Oak (due to a oak tree outside of Gosling’s office) and ending in Java, referring to the java coffee. It was designed to have a syntax similar to C/C++, a very popular programming language at the time. Oracle (former Sun Microsystems) launched the first public version in 1996. Nowadays, it is used to develop Enterprise Software and Android Apps. It is a highly scalable and secure language promising a WORA functionality (Write once, Run Anywhere). Although it is quite a powerful language it requires a lot of boilerplate code and can be quite verbose.

4. C#

This languages shares a similar approach to Java, with the exception that it runs, primarily on Microsoft Platforms. The development of the .NET framework, the foundation of C#, was publicly announced on July, 2000. Although this language feels great to develop in, it is heavily restricted to mobile development, general game development and for windows.

5. C++

This language can be thought as a double edge sword, since, while it is undoubtedly the most powerful language ever created, it is extremely hard for someone new to programming to start with it. It is well-known for OS development and games, due to its low level memory management features and access to the underlying hardware. But with so much power comes responsibility: due to its complexity, bugs can be easily introduced, making this a hard language to learn.

6. Ruby

Ruby is quite popular in web development using the framework Ruby On Rails. Invented in 1993 by Matsumoto, this language is described as being a simple Lisp language at its core. With its ease of use and readability it has a focus on convention over configuration. However, since it is interpreted, it suffers from the same problem as python: the speed.

7. Swift

Similarly to C#, Swift is not cross-compatible, since it only works on Apple products. The development started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner. Inspired on other languages, such as Rust, Haskell, Objective-C and many others, Swift was made as replacement for the apple products that up until that moment used Objective-C. As such, it was very important to provide compatibility between those 2 languages. However, as said before, it suffers from the same problem as C#, meaning that you cannot use this language outside of Apple products.

8. PHP

PHP emerged, together with Apache, as an alternative to create dynamic web pages and web applications. It started in 1993, when Rasmus Lerdof wrote some C code to sustain its own personal homepage. Later he extended his implementation to interface with databases and web forms. He called his code, PHP/FI meaning “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter”. However due to its nature, it is quite prone to security issues and have some inconsistencies within the language itself.

9. Go

GoLang or Go for short is a language developed by google to build highly scalable and efficient applications. Designed in the year of 2007, its first appearance was 2 years later, in November 2009. This is a language widely used at Google and in many opensource projects. Due to the focus on simplicity, concurrency and performance, this is a very top contender in massively scaled applications, with its major drawback being the lack of support for object oriented programming.

10. Rust

And last but not least, we have Rust, a very powerful language and a real contender to the C language. Home grown in 2006, Rust begun in 2006 and by the year of 2011, it already compiled itself, a major step in all programming languages. This amazing language offers memory safety without using a garbage collector or reference counting present in languages such as Java, while remaining being extremely performant due to its groundbreaking new borrow checker that tracks the lifetime of all objects in compile time. However this new shift in the paradigm raises the learning curve and, due to its relatively small community, resources are scarce.

Conclusion

This is a non-exhaustive list of some programming languages that changed the world. In no specific order, these languages are within the most powerful languages created. Hope you liked, stay tuned for more articles!