the aj blog

Visual Studio is a non-free environment for the Visual language series.

It’s Good to Know

I had no idea about the differences between languages when I started to program. At first I learned HTML, then I went to Visual Basic. That was the mistake. Visual Basic is only available on Windows. After that, I seemed to want to continue to step down to lower and lower-level languages until I got to the base of it all. I’ve nearly succeeded, and went to C++, tried some Assembly, then turned to chip languages. I’m so far at Arduino/Wiring and some C. So, I want to give a ultra-quick comparison between common programming languages.

Visual Basic

Based off of original BASIC, Visual Basic is Microsoft’s .NET version. Compiled programs will only run on Windows or emulating environments, such as WINE. It’s a very simple yet powerful tool that can produce very nice GUIs.

Java

Cross-platform, Java is slightly slower, requires a JRE on target machines, is harder than most to learn, and requires skill to produce neat GUIs.

C++

Pure C++ has no built-in UI functions. Usually, OpenGL and other libraries are used. Very powerful, unmanaged code requires you clean up your memory mess or else the used RAM is not usable until reboot.

Python

Another powerful scripting language. Very popular, simple.

Lua

This is a very minimalistic language. I’ve only seen it used in odd little places like World of Warcraft addons and game scripting interfaces. In both cases, special functions are introduced to do other things in different languages. Lua interpreters can be integrated in many places where simple scripting is required.

Processing

Processing is very commonly used to create mathematical art, due to the easily accessible drawing functions. It is also used for interfacing to serial port devices and graphing or manipulating the data they send back.

Synopsis

From a job perspective, you should learn what the market seems to need at that particular time. For hobby things, use whatever you can do and think you’d like. You can almost always learn something different later!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 9:28 pm and is filed under programming, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.