Читать книгу Beginning Programming All-in-One For Dummies - Wallace Wang - Страница 50

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deciding on your first language

Understanding curly-bracket languages

Determining artificial intelligence languages

Figuring out scripting languages

Understanding database programming languages

Weighing up different programming languages

After you understand how to plan, organize, and create a program through one or more methodologies (such as structured programming, event-driven programming, object-oriented programming, or protocol-oriented programming), you’re ready to start learning a particular programming language.

Just as your native spoken language can shape the way you think and speak, so can your first computer programming language influence the way you think, design, and write a computer program.

You can choose from literally thousands of different programming languages with obscure names, like Algol 60, APL, Forth, Icon, and Scheme. Although you can understand programming by using any programming language, it’s probably best to start with one of the more popular programming languages for the operating system you want to target.

In the world of Windows, one popular language is C#, which is Microsoft’s version of Java and C++. In the world of Apple products (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV), the most popular language is Swift, which replaces Apple’s former official language of Objective-C.

If you want to write apps for Android, learn Kotlin, which has Google’s official support to replace Java. Google also has another unique language called Flutter, based on the Dart programming language, which can be used to create Android and iOS apps at the same time.

If you want to write programs that run on servers to create interactive websites, look at Java, JavaScript, or Python. If you want to get involved in low-level programming, look at C and assembly language.

Because most popular programming languages are derived from C, learning C and its object-oriented version, C++, will always provide you with a strong foundation for learning practically any other programming language in the future.

Knowing a popular programming language simply gives you more opportunities. Just as knowing Arabic, Chinese, English, or Spanish allows you to travel and speak with more people around the world (compared to knowing Eskimo, Mayan, or Swahili), so can knowing one or more popular programming languages give you more opportunities to work and write programs anywhere you go.

Sometimes there’s a good reason to know an obscure programming language. One of the oldest programming languages, COBOL, was heavily used by businesses back when computers filled entire rooms and millions of dollars. Because many COBOL programs are still running today, COBOL programmers can actually make a nice living because so few programmers know COBOL. Knowing an obscure language may limit your opportunities, but at the same time, if someone needs a programmer who knows that language, you could be the only one they could hire (and have to pay big bucks as a result).