Programming Languages: Advantages and Disadvantages

In today’s programming world, a computer programmer has a variety of computer languages to choose from, so one might ask how a programmer chooses what language to use or what the advantages and disadvantages of these computer languages are. In order to answer these questions, let us start by identifying a few of the types of programming languages that are available in today’s society. They are:

Object-Oriented Languages (http://www.oop.esmartkid.com/seventhOOP.htm)

Advantages

Modifiability - small changes are uncomplicated in the data representation or the procedures in an Object-oriented program.

Maintainability - objects can be maintained separately, making locating and fixing problems easier

Reusability - objects can be reused in different programs

Disadvantages

Must be well managed

Instance (or shared class) variables of an object can be accessed by class-specialized functions, and called the same way as any other function

Not as effective on simple programs

Procedural Languages (http://javaboutique.internet.com/articles/ITJ/part02/page03.html)

Advantages

Easy to read program code

Easy maintainable program code as various procedures can be debugged in isolation

Code is more flexible as you can change a specific procedure that gets implemented across the program

Disadvantages

Modifying one part of the code requires modification of the entire code

As code grows, it gets harder to understand and modify

Hard to apply code from one program to another

Functional Languages (http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html)

Advantages

Functions cannot cause side effects

Easy debugging

Concurrency ready

Disadvantages

No guarantee first line of code will be executed before second

Unable to do IO

Unable to interact with outside world

Now that we have gone over the types of programming languages, let us turn our attention to the specific programming languages available today. The programming world today offers a variety of different programming languages, but in the essence of time, we shall concentrate on the “TIOBE Programming Community Index for February 2011” top 10 programming languages. These languages are:

Java

C

C++

Python

PHP

C#

(Visual) Basic

Objective-C

JavaScript

Perl

These programming languages may be the most popular at this point in time, but what about the past and which one will be the most popular in the future. In order to make a better prediction of the future, let us look at the past; but, let us keep in mind that out of these top 10 popular programming languages, only the C programming language and the Perl programming languages are not object-oriented programming languages; they are Procedural programming languages.

Now, as far as the past goes, the TIOBE Software website indicates that the Java programming language has been the preferred or most popular programming language over the past 10 years, with the C programming language being a consistent second best. An exception to Java’s popularity reign was the time period between the middle of 2004 and 2005, when the C programming language surpassed Java as the most popular programming language. Just on this information alone, one can assume that Java will continue to be the most popular programming language; but, for the sake of being thorough, let us look at some more historical data. Over the past 5 years, the object-oriented programming language has been the most popular programming language and, as mentioned earlier, eight of the ten current most popular programming languages are object-oriented. Taking into consideration all of the past and present data, which indicates a continued preference in statically typed object-oriented programming languages, I am inclined to believe that the Java programming language will continue to be the most popular programming language.