Exploring Programming Language Basics

Overview

Most companies lean heavily toward a specific language or set of languages, depending on what the code is used for. Server-side applications in enterprise settings tend to prefer Java, whereas machine learning (ML) applications perform fairly well in functional languages or hybrid languages such as Python. Whichever language you find yourself closest to, you should learn the basics of that language. If the team you work with is heavily using a functional language and you only know object-oriented (OO) languages, use this as an opportunity to bridge the gap and learn the fundamentals of functional programming.

As a brief recap, object-oriented programming (OOP) is a language paradigm where the application is defined by a series of objects that can interact with each other. An object consists of data fields and methods that act upon the data fields. Most OOP languages also support events, which are methods that are automatically invoked based on the state of the application. As an example, in a standard Windows dialog box, the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons on the dialog box are both objects. Both buttons have an event to handle when a user clicks on the button. The buttons also have data, such as the text on the button, pointers to the ...