Java, probably my favourite programming language to date.
Possibly because it was the first main language I learned during University. Java
is a general-purpose language and has existed for over two decades. Its
popularity comes from its ease of use, object-oriented design and being
platform independent. I have used Java mainly for University projects and
really enjoyed using the language! I wanted to give a brief evaluation of the
language and my experiences with it.
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One of my favourite things about Java was how simple
it was to learn, debug and compile. Through its use of automatic memory
allocation and garbage collection allowed me to focus on writing and
understanding the code as opposed to focusing on memory leaks. I also found
that I could pick up programming concepts in Java more easily due to its simple
nature. As well as this object-orientation extends my point on the simplicity
of the language. An object-oriented language, in my opinion are easier to learn
as you can relate them to everyday tasks. Therefore when it came to learning inheritance
I could use real world examples in my code to relate to them i.e a pig extends
an animal.
In contrast to this a disadvantage of Java is that it is
comparatively slower to other languages. For some of my larger projects I have
found it takes a lot longer to compute. Especially when you are dealing with
computation-heavy algorithms on larger data sets. Other languages have better
optimised their language for faster computation.
Another big advantage of Java is its ability to build
Android apps. My whole second year University project was based off building an
Android game. Of the 432 million smartphones sold in the last quarter, 352
million ran Android (81.7 percent) and 77 million ran iOS (17.9 percent). This
shows the importance of Java being so closely tied to Android. Again I found using
Java to write Android Apps allowed me to gain a better understanding of
programming in a general sense, as well as being able to write logical code
with good unit tests. Java’s foundation allowed me to learn other languages
more easily due to my solid understanding of programming concepts that Java had
taught me.
However despite of all this the competition for Java keeps
on getting stiffer. Languages such as Python and PHP also gained a good
reputation following Java’s initial release. Some would argue that Java is
losing popularity. However Java continues to evolve and is constantly getting
updated. As well as this Java dominates business enterprise applications and
90% of Fortune 500 companies use Java according to IDC analyst Al Hilwa. Here are the most popular programming languages in 2018 according to Github.
Java is platform independent which means that java source
code can run on all operating systems. The compiler converts the high-level
language into a format understood by the machines. As opposed to C++ for
example where the compiler generates an .exe file which is operating system
dependent. Therefore the software that you build is easily distributed and can
be used on any machine! Therefore you get to make apps which are easier to maintain
and gain a greater reach as anyone can gain access to them.
To conclude I would really recommend Java to any developer
starting out. In my experience it has been my favourite language to develop
with. Java is one of the most popular languages today and is demanding by a huge
amount of companies today. Due to its object oriented nature, I have always
found creating applications in Java lead to clean and reusable code.
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