The Programming Language Guide

hey what's going on guys so technology has so many different areas as you know and when it comes to programming there's so many different languages to learn and it can be it can be quite overwhelming especially for beginners um so what i wanted to do in this video was was basically a crash course of programming languages and just go through a lot of the modern languages and talk about what they're good for you know how they work and also look at things like low level versus high level and what that means talk about compiled versus interpreted languages statically typed versus dynamically typed so it's going to be a little more than like a top 10 programming language video um and i think that it'll help a lot of beginners and even for people that are looking to learn a second or third language i think it can give you some good insight so i'm going to jump into some slides just so i can better convey the information so hopefully you guys enjoy it and let's get into it [Music] all right guys so before we get into specific programming languages we should first talk about low level verse high level and when i say level i'm really talking about the comparison between the language or the code that we write and the machine and what the machine understands because your your computer doesn't directly understand javascript or c-sharp or java or anything like that it has to be compiled into something that the cpu understands so when i say levels i'm basically talking about how close to the hardware the language is and how much abstraction there is between them so you can almost think of the hardware as the lowest level up from that we have machine language or machine code which is the absolute lowest level of code which consists of instructions that are used to control the machine's cpu or central processing unit and these instructions are strictly numeric and they're in the form of zeros and ones which is called binary machine code can also be represented as hexadecimal so it's easier for humans to read but ultimately machines only process zeros and ones because those it represents an electrical state that's either on or off all right now programmers don't write machine code at least anymore i guess you could but it would be very tedious and very error prone and i don't think there's many companies hiring senior machine code developers all right so the next level we have up from that i should see the the next language we have is called assembly language or asm or just assembly and assembly uses numbers symbols and abbreviations as opposed to just ones and zeros like binary machine code and assembly code isn't actually compiled like some of the higher level languages it's converted or assembled into executable machine code by something called an assembler compiling which i'll talk about soon is a much more complicated task than assembling a lot more goes into it and you can learn assembly language there's youtube videos there's even udemy courses that you can take to learn assembly language and i do think it's interesting because you really start to understand how software works with the cpu and works with your computer's hardware assembly is typically used today to develop software or firmware for embedded systems now from here we have the next level which consists of a bunch of general purpose languages that are that are pretty common now in some cases you'll see charts like this that refer to these as high level languages languages like c c plus plus however that's when you're comparing it to the whole chart to machine language assembly language and so on these languages are lower than something like python or java or ruby which we'll talk about later so let's take a look at c c is the lowest level general purpose language the only thing lower than c is assembly and machine code and c was created in the early 70s by dennis ritchie and was actually derived from another language called b and c was used in the development of the unix operating system it's a procedural language as opposed to an object-oriented one and it's lower level than many other languages so you do have to manage some some hardware resources such as memory allocation and i'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide so c is very powerful it's used for things like operating systems the windows kernel for instance is built with c it's also used to build compilers for other languages it's used for drivers database systems and many other powerful programs and c is also a compiled language so before we move to the next language let's talk about compiled versus interpreted languages so a compile language requires a piece of software called a compiler which will compile the code that you write with a language like c down to instructions that the machine understands so the compiled program is not human readable it's meant for them the machine and it's executed by the cpu now usually with lower level compiled languages such as c you have to manage your memory so memory allocation cpu usage you have more access to the hardware but of course it's more difficult to work with with an interpreted language the source code is not directly compiled to machine code there's more abstraction to it and a program called an interpreter reads and executes the code in some languages like python and ruby are first compiled into some sort of byte code which are binary instructions that are executed by a virtual machine such as the python virtual machine technically they do have a compile step but they're not being compiled directly to machine code like with with a lower level language like c so we usually refer to those as interpreted or scripting languages now interpreted languages are typically easier to work with and allow you to write code faster so there's a fast write time however there's more abstraction than with a compile language where your code is simply compiled directly into machine code and executed so this makes programs faster at runtime for compile languages and of course this isn't all you're going to look at when choosing a language it's just good to know the difference so the next language we're going to look at is c plus plus which is another lower level language that was created in the 80s and it's actually a superset of c meaning that it is essentially c but it has a bunch of extra tools so c plus plus is actually object oriented which is a coding paradigm based on the concepts of objects and like i was talking about in the last slide both c and c plus plus there's no what's called garbage collection which means that you have to manually allocate and free memory within your code so c plus plus is an incredibly powerful language it's used to build things like aaa gaming titles operating systems it's used in vr robotics scientific computing and stuff like that so if you're interested in those types of uh that part of technology then c plus plus might be something to look into all right so rust or rustling is a relatively new low level and high performance language that provides higher level capabilities and it provides protection to keep you from making mistakes with memory allocation so that there is no garbage collection but there is protection built in more so than something like c or c plus plus and rust can be used for game engines operating systems browser components vr and much more and it can be used to create web servers and used in the back end for for web development you can create apis and microservices with rust it has some frameworks like rocket which will help you build web applications and one area that i think rust is is thriving in and will continue to thrive in is web assembly so webassembly is a new type of byte code that can be run in modern browsers and it provides very high performance within the browser much higher than than what javascript can give us so there's a few languages that can be compiled into webassembly including c plus plus and rust and i think webassembly is going to be huge in the future for things like gaming and video tools within the browser so learning rust may be a really good idea if you're into that kind of thing all right so we're going to move to some higher even higher level languages which are most of which are interpreted so they're not quite as fast in terms of the the software you build but they're generally easier to learn and extremely popular in the industry since this channel is focused mostly on web development these are probably the language that you're going to be choosing from also i do want to mention that there are other lower level languages that are you know on this level here such as pascal but i i don't want to make this video too long so i'm not going to talk about every single language in existence so next we're going to look at java so java is a high-level class-based object-oriented programming language everything and you create create in java is essentially an object or part of an object and objects are defined by classes that have variables which are also called properties and functions also called methods so java is a what's called a write once run anywhere language meaning that compiled java code can run on all platforms that support java without the need to recompile so java code is typically compiled into bytecode that can run on what's called the jvm or the java virtual machine and i'm sure that you guys have installed all of installed the jvm on your computer at one point or another so java is used for a lot of different things including graphical you know desktop applications enterprise applications java's still pretty popular in big business it's also used for web servers and apis it's used for mobile app development specifically android apps google uses java for many of its products minecraft was created with java and companies like spotify linkedin amazon all use it in one form or another java is also statically typed so this is something else that i wanted to talk a little bit about before moving forward so every general purpose language that we've talked about up up to this point is statically typed and what that means is that the type checking is performed at compile time and we have to explicitly define types for our data within our code so for our variables and our function returns if something is a string we need to define it as a string and it can't change into a boolean or some other type now dynamic languages such as javascript and python which we'll get to soon do not require us to define types explicitly as type checking is done at runtime so it basically assumes the type automatically or dynamically as far as which is better there's trade-offs with dynamic languages you don't have to worry about you know typing everything so it's less code however statically typed languages can be less prone to errors and can be more robust so just keep that in mind moving along and i know that i have a lot of javascript developers as viewers and you can just think of you know javascript versus typescript because typescript is javascript with static typing all right so i wanted to mention kotlin right after java because it also uses the java virtual machine the jvm and it's it's also used for android apps in fact most modern native android apps are built with kotlin uh if you're looking to learn kotlin or java i'd probably suggest kotlin because of its popularity and and most people say that it's easier easier than java i don't really have any experience with kotlin but it can be used as an object-oriented language or procedural code in addition to mobile development it can be used for web servers data science and and much more so as far as who uses kotlin you have cache app vmware plan grid these are some examples of of services or companies products that use kotlin so next we're going to look at c sharp which is another compiled and statically typed language and unlike c and c plus plus it is fully managed in terms of garbage collection i know all the different c languages can be confusing but c sharp is higher level than the others it is object oriented much like java in fact a lot of the syntax is or looks similar to java in my opinion i've used both i would most likely suggest c sharp over java though you have the net framework which c sharp can use you can also use the visual basic language as well as f-sharp with the.net framework c-sharp is typically called a compiled language but it's compiled it isn't compiled directly to machine code it's compiled into something called il or c-sharp intermediate language and c-sharp also uses the clr or common language runtime environment so it is compiled there's just a little more abstraction to the process c-sharp is used for desktop applications especially windows apps microsoft did create c-sharp and net so they're great tools for building on windows c-sharp is also used for web development you have the asp.net mvc framework it can also be used for gaming along with unity and mobile apps along with xamarin i think csharpen.net is an excellent choice for a tech stack for for many different purposes microsoft's visual studio ide is used to build c-sharp apps but c-sharp is also one of the languages that it was built with including vb.net so next we're going to look at go or golang which is an extremely powerful open source language supported by google it's it's a compiled statically typed language used for a lot of different things and it's really known for being very fast and scalable and it has a very robust standard library as well many parts of go are inspired by other languages for example it borrows static typing and run time efficiency from c and its readability and usability from python and javascript so one thing i see over and over when it comes to go programming is like i said it has a very robust standard library and when talking about web development usually you use a back end framework with with these types of languages if you want to build some kind of rest api or something but with go you actually don't need a framework for something like that in many cases there are frameworks available but like i said it just has a great standard library that comes with it as far as examples of what it's used for you have back-end apis and microservices distributed network services and cloud-native development some companies that use go are obviously google uber dropbox and many more all right so next we're going to get into python which is extremely popular right now and is very diverse in its uses so python is a dynamic language or dynamically typed interpreted language also called a scripting language and although it does first get compiled into something called bytecode that then is executed by the interpreter so python is is the preferred language of many developers in many different areas it's amazing when it comes to machine learning and ai as well as data science automation and web development as far as web development which is you know kind of my area um python has some really great frameworks django and flask i think are two of the two of my top i'd say probably my top five to seven uh somewhere in that range especially django django's probably in my top three frameworks of all time but python is not a c syntax language so it looks different than something like c or java or javascript we don't use curly braces and we don't use semicolons for termination instead we use indentation so it looks more like plain english than many other languages some companies that use python are nasa intel ibm spotify and many other massive companies okay so ruby is a highly portable dynamically typed language that's used for many purposes it's an interpreted languages but like python it's first compiled to bytecode and then interpreted by a virtual machine i've used both python and ruby in my career and there seems to be a lot of similarities they're both relatively easy to learn they're high level interpreted languages python is is uh faster than ruby in general but there's a lot of there's a lot of similarities ruby also doesn't use curly braces we have the indentation syntax and the creator of ruby yukahiro matsumoto or mats he actually said that one of his goals when creating ruby was to make it a pretty language a good-looking language that was easy to to read and write so it's it almost looks like english so ruby's used for building desktop applications automation tools and web development usually when we talk about ruby and web development which we're talking about ruby on rails which is a popular framework that i personally love and and worked with for a little over a year and it's a very opinionated framework and offers a ton of tools which makes it great for rapid development so you can basically scaffold up a crud application that uses a database in literally a minute or two it's it has lost some popularity over the last few years but it's still a great framework some companies that use ruby in one way or another are twitter dribble and groupon all right so now we're at the language that is very popular among my viewers and very popular in general because javascript is the language of the browser so if you're a web developer you're you're going to know at least some javascript and it used to be i'd say like maybe like 10 years ago when javascript was first created it was used to build little interactive widgets on the page given you know some dynamic properties but over the years with the introduction of front-end frameworks like react it's used for a hell of a lot more and we can build very powerful single page applications that that runs strictly on the client and then in addition to that we have node.js which allows us to run javascript on the server and use it just like we would any of these other backend languages and many full stack developers including myself prefer node.js over other backend solutions because they like to have the same language on the back end as they do on the front end node.js is also extremely fast and at least for for a lot of different tasks it's very fast and it has a great ecosystem with npm which is the node package manager so javascript is an interpreted scripting language that by default is dynamic but if you want you can use typescript which is a superset of javascript that adds static typing so front-end javascript is used by just about every company that that does anything in the browser and node.js or backend javascript is used by companies like nasa paypal medium and netflix we also have technologies like react native that lets us use javascript to build mobile applications and then we have electron as well as some other frameworks that allow us to use javascript to build desktop applications in fact vs code is built with javascript as well as some other popular desktop apps such as postman and slack so javascript is absolutely everywhere which is another reason that i love it all right so next we're going to look at php which is actually the first language that i really learned java was the first language that i ever used but i stopped when i decided to go into web dev because php was so popular at the time so php is a dynamic scripting language that is used to build static and dynamic websites and web apps and what's really cool about php and makes it very practical for web developers is that you can embed php directly into directly with html and that makes it easy to add functionality to websites without having to call external files so php can be used as a procedural language or as an object oriented language the syntax can sometimes be pretty messy i think that it gets a lot of flack for that so i do prefer to use it in an object-oriented way i think that makes it much cleaner there are some great frameworks web frameworks for php such as laravel and there's all types of open source tools like wordpress which is a blogging platform or a cms so php is great for making things fast which makes it really popular in the freelancing community as well as small businesses there's quite uh quite a bit of hate online towards php but it's getting better part of the reason of that is i think php is getting better now with version eight and it's usually from people that never really worked with it or haven't worked with it for a while or have never worked as a freelancer or outside of a big company on a team because again php is great for just building things fast and getting getting products out there all right so swift is a general purpose compiled language developed by apple and is mostly used to develop applications for ios ipad os mac os and any other device that apple creates it's relatively easy to learn and it's extremely fast iphone applications used to be created mostly with a language called objective c but most are built with swift these days and i believe apple has stated that swift is about 2.5 times faster than objective c so if you're looking or thinking of going into native ios apps or mac os swift is is one of your main choices like i said swift is very fast and it's compiled into it's first compiled into something called swift intermediate language and then into machine code from what i understand and companies like uber robinhood and lyft all use swift in their tech stacks all right so obviously there's other programming languages out there but i think that these are some of the most popular ones at least at this time and as you can see they're all very different so what i would suggest is just look at what you want to do in tech and find the language that best suits you you may have to try a few languages but that's fine even if you learn let's say the basics in ruby if you switch to python there'll be a lot that you can grasp very quickly because of what you learned in ruby and a lot of it comes down to syntax but i also wanted you to just get familiar with what high-level languages are and low-level and static and dynamic typing and all that good stuff so i hope you learned something from this video and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 256,269

Keywords: programming, programming languages, coding, best programming language, machine code, assembly language, c programming, c++, rustlang, C#, Java, JavaScript, golang, kotlin, ruby, python, swift, php

Id: 2lVDktWK-pc

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022