Best Programming languages: What Language Should You Learn?

When developing a project, we often overlook the importance of our chosen programming language and focus all our attention on the hardware. However, choosing the wrong programming language can seriously impact our project during the final stage when we realize that the chosen language doesn’t support the hardware being used or that a device is far too complicated to program.

For example, many I2C devices make both schematic and PCB design trivial but can be extraordinarily hard to program. Not all manufacturers provide libraries in every language, and as such, the software development stage of a project can suffer horrendously.

As such, it is essential that we choose the right programming language for our project at the very beginning. Therefore, the computer programming language that we choose should be chosen to help simplify the task needed, provide all the libraries we need, and meet the performance requirements of our project.

▬ Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

0:00 Why is choosing a language important?
01:01 Determine your platform and know its limits
02:50 Assembler - The fundamental language
06:22 C - One language to rule them all
08:30 C++ - Like C, but more helpful
10:04 Python - Chiselled by the gods themselves
12:19 Java - C++ but made confusing!
13:38 Visual Basic - A guilty pleasure
15:03 So, how do we choose the right language?
17:17 Choosing the right language - Final thoughts

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[WilliamBurlingame]

An excellent presentation on computer languages. I am an 86-year-old retired programmer. I started programming in the 1960s and used mostly assembly language for many years. In addition, I’ve written code in FORTRAN, Pascal, C and Basic for work related jobs. I never got into OOP. The early computers had limited resources so the need to write most programs in assembly language. Memory on one computer was 4K words and computer speed was a few megahertz. I also learned to patch programs in machine code. When we wrote a program, it was written on coding sheets with a pencil and turned into a group who entered the code into a machine that output either punched cards or punched paper tape. Depending on the system, source and/or executable code was returned on punched media. It took a day or more to get your punched media back. If there were assembly errors, new coding sheets had to be created to before you could begin debugging on the computer. If a bug was found, it meant entering machine code into the computer via toggle switches on the front panel. Later in the process, the new code was incorporated onto coding sheets and the process was repeated. Another consideration was that computer time was shared among the staff and had to be scheduled. The computer was scheduled to be used for the entire 24 hr day, unless it was down for maintenance. A few years ago, I got interested in the Arduino family of boards, later in the Raspberry Pi SBCs and Pico boards. I haven’t had a need to deal with time critical problems, so I enjoy being able to implement my projects with Python or Micro Python.

[DIYMachines]

Hi Robin, I gleaned some useful nuggets of information from your video. Thanks. 👍

[e.v.a.l.s]

newbie here i thought assembly has instructions for add, subtract, and multiply. and you're on your own for division

[gordonmgx]

Is assembly level programming more secure?