Programming languages, which I learned

In my past I got in contact with an number of programming languages. In this post I will list them and extract the key points, I learned or liked from the language. This can be a variety of different things, like how simple something is or brilliant concepts.

C/C++

I am at home in the embedded world. So C and it’s successor C++ are the languages the whole industry uses. Everything is possible with it, however it is really easy to shoot yourself in the foot. The key benefit for this languages, is to write device drivers. Also performance critical stuff may be written in C.

C/C++ was my first programming language, which I used as professional. So this language was the door opener for my career in software engineering. What can you learn from this language? Understanding of the hardware and device drivers. It allows you to tinker with it. If you are interested in how the world is controlled, this is an important language for you.

Rust

The new kid on the block in the embedded world. I never tried it on bare metal devices myself, however it should be possible. The essence of the language is to enforce safe programming.

Rust doesn’t require a runtime so it is possible to get it running on a bare metal platform, which I never tried. My experience with this language is my toy project. So there are a number of things, which you can get out of rust.

First of all, the concept of ownership and borrowing. This is brilliant, no race conditions, no memory leaks and so on. It practically removes by design an enormous amount of traps, which are well known in C.

Great type system. You get what you need. Struct and tuples are straight forward. But the enums really rock.

enum IpAddr {
  V4(u8, u8, u8, u8),
  V6(String),
}

What do we see here, enums can also have a value. This is basically a kind of variant datatype. But if you try to access it in an unsafe way, or even don’t consider defined values, you will get an compiler error. This makes your code readable and robust at the same time.

What else, does this language have more to show. Yes it has! This was the first modern language, I encountered, which has no classes. My first thought wtf, why? But this time is long gone. The object oriented paradigm is on the way down and Rust shows how we can get over it.

Python

Personally I am not a big fan of python but this language has benefits and is definitely one to look at. It is just so simple to get started and you can learn it really quick. It is also often used for build scripts or to automate routine tasks, and there it is really great. I get in touch with this language for automation and you will probably too. What’s missing in my humbled opinion is a type system. I like languages which allows, at least to define the function arguments.

Haskell

What a language. I only played with it and it is hard to get your head around. It was my first encounter with functional programming. The mathematical terms used in the documentation and library doesn’t make the life easier. What did I get out of the language.

First of all, immutability is not a problem at all. It is a solution! No side effects in the language are a great feature. If you don’t have side effects, reasoning is easy. That enables you to read and test your code.

And what else, partial function application.

plus:: Num a => a -> a -> a
plus a b = a + b

add3 :: Num a => a -> a
add3 = plus 3

You don’t have to know each parameter of an function. Just apply some of the parameter and you get a knew function. It is simple, however realizing that this concept is powerful took me a long time.

Lambdas, I was familiar with this concept, however hasn’t realized the power of them. I am looking back now at the design patterns of the gang of four and see them in a different light. These patterns solves how to inject functions from outside. So basically the problems lambdas and higher order functions solve.

I recommend you to have a look at this language. It really boosted my understanding of computer science and broke my fixed view on object orientation.

Clojure

This is another really interesting language, which is based on lisp. It shows you that almost no syntax is required in for an programming language. This is so powerful because it allows meta programming. You write programs, which basically write programs. Even “core” functionality of this language, is written with itself, using macros.

So what you can get out of it. Simplicity matters! The language is simple and fulfills the requirements of a modern programming language. It’s core concept is published in 1958 and still forms the base of a modern programming language. So learning one lisp like language will serve you well.

Xtend

The last language, which I used professionally is xtend. It’s translated into java and afterwards compiled to machine code. This language doesn’t give you a lot of new concepts and it’s not worth learning this language for education. I have used it to generate C/C++ code from a domain specific language using xtext. So it’s basically a technology choice, which was made for this project and it served us well. But don’t learn it to broaden your horizon.

Conclusion

What is the next programming language you should have a look at. The answer is as always it depends.

However, there are a lot of languages out in the wild. Choose the language, which is fitting your task and career path. There is also another advice I came across, while reading “The pragmatic programmer”. Learn the language of your editor. This is the program you will spend most of the time, so learn to control it.