Technical Book Club: Code Complete – Choice of Programming Language
The choice of the programming language you use for a project has the potential to help or hinder your progress greatly. For a new project, you have the luxury of examining the project’s requirements and choosing a language that fits. However, many development jobs out there deal with legacy code, meaning that this choice has already been made. As I mentioned in my previous post, my first professional development job was working with legacy code that was written in Visual Basic 6. I was chosen for this position based on my experience with VB6, since that would mean that I would have less time ramping up on the language, and more time getting right into the code. As the book points out, familiarity with a language can have huge benefits in productivity. My experience tends to agree with the idea that it takes around three years to get truly familiar with a language, though knowledge with a similar language can cut this down quite a bit.
One of the great things about VB6 was that it was such a high level language, it read a lot like English. If you named your variables right, you could tell exactly what a block of code was doing. Some things, though, just weren’t present in the language, and so were made very difficult to access, often requiring direct calls to the Windows API. This difficulty reminded me of the book 1984, and the concept of Newspeak. The idea behind Newspeak was to remove the ability of the general population to think of concepts like freedom and rebellion by removing the words that describe them. Without the words, it is very difficult to express something, or even to think that it would even be possible to describe.
If you aren’t familiar with some of the languages presented in the last part of this section, you should take a moment and read up on them. Wikipedia has a great set of resources about programming languages, and if you’re interested in seeing some of them in action, head on over to 99 Bottles of Beer, a website that currently contains 1281 different programming languages and variations. A couple of languages that you absolutely do not want to start a project in are Cow, and Whitespace. Check them out, and you’ll see why.
