For most projects, the right language is easy to choose.
Your company may have standardized on a particular development environment and language (and you may have been hired because you were already familiar with the language). Or you may be updating or enhancing an existing program; it's almost always best to use the same language the existing program is written in. In some cases, however, someone will need to select the best (or, since the best may be somewhat arguable, at least an appropriate language). In some cases, you or your team of developers may need to know several languages for different purposes.
General saying about programming languages are that:
- Perl or a similar script language is most suitable for small tasks and sometimes acting as a program that goes between other, larger programs.
- Visual Basic is most suitable for relatively novice programmers and relatively simple programs.
- Java, C++, or comparable languages like Python and Tcl is most suitable for larger applications using object orientation as a design model.
- C is most suitable for programs where efficiency and performance are the primary concern.
- The appropriate assembler language is most suitable where the program is relatively short and high performance is critical.
Where constraints permit, some programmers may favor one object-oriented language over another (for example, Java, C++, Python, or Tcl). A programmer with skills in C is likely to prefer C++, which combines the procedural and other concepts and syntax of C with object-oriented concepts. |
