Over the past 24 days, I have posted a new post daily, with a new programming language each day. Each post have told a bit about some key features of each language, a bit on the history, typical uses and an example of how to use the language. For me it has been an interesting series, and I have learnt quite a bit. During this series, I have covered the following languages: ...
We have finally reached Christmas Eve, and the final language in this series, Python. This is a general-purpose, high-level language, designed to emphasize code readability. It supports object-oriented, imperative and functional, as well as procedural programming styles. It has a large standard library, and it provides a dynamic type system and automatic memory management. Python is available for many platforms, and there are third-party tools to allow packaging in such a way that you can have it as a stand-alone executable, without needing to install an interpreter. The reference implementation, CPython, is open-source, and follows a community-based development process. This is the case with almost all of the alternative implementations. ...
It is the day before Christmas, and today I´ll also talk about a relatively new language, called Go. This is a compiled, statically typed language, primarily designed for systems programming. It has features such as garbage collection, various safety features and CSP-style concurrent programming. Today there are two major implementations. Google has one called “gc”, which is open source and targets different platforms. The second one is called “gccgo”, and is a GCC frontend. ...
With only a few days left until Christmas, I want to tell you a bit about a relatively new language, Rust. This is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled language, designed to a safe, concurrent and practical language. It is developed by Mozilla Research, and it supports pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural and object-oriented styles. Today development is sponsored by Mozilla, however it it a open community project. History Rust started out as a personal project by Graydon Hoare, from Mozilla. In 2009 Mozilla started to sponsor the project, and it was first announced in 2010. Originally the compiler was written in OCaml, but in 2010 they started the work to make it self-hosting, which they succeeded with in 2011. The first stable release (1.0) was released earlier this year. ...
Today I’ll talk a bit about Visual Basic (VB). This is a language in the BASIC family, and it is is a event-driven language and IDE from Microsoft. It was first created to support the COM programming model from Microsoft, and it was intended to be relatively easy to learn. Seeing as it is derived from BASIC it enables rapid development of graphical user interface applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects or ActiveX Data Objects. It also enables the creation of ActiveX controls and objects. ...