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What Programming Language For Linux Development?
k33l0r writes "Recently I've been thinking about developing (or learning to develop) for Linux. I'm an IT university student but my degree program focuses almost exclusively on Microsoft tools (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET, etc.) which is why I would like to expand my repertoire on my own. Personally I'm quite comfortable in a Linux environment, but have never programmed for it. Over the years I've developed a healthy fear of everything Java and I'm not too sure of what I think of Python's use of indentation to delimit blocks. The question that remains is: what language and tools should I be using?"
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This question is remarkably easy.
The UNIX API is written in C. If you don't know C, you won't be able to understand UNIX system calls.
Beyond that, learn Java and learn Python. You yourself say you have a "fear of Java." Sounds like a pretty good reason to learn it. Likewise, you say you're not sure about Python's use of indentation. Sounds like another good reason to learn it.
It is usually good practice to learn one new language a year. These recommendations should be seen as beginnings not endings.
My final bit of advice is to learn PROLOG, LISP, Haskell or Erlang. And by 'learn,' I mean 'become fluent in.' These languages are radically different from anything you've experienced before. Learning how to think differently about problems will make you a much better programmer, regardless of what language you ultimately wind up using in the private sector.
I was also curious about your "healthy fear of anything Java" .NET experience Java is a significantly more mature language than C#. You are more likely to get better performance and stability out of Java's virtual machines just because they've had more time to be beat up by a vast community of developers. M$ did a good job of getting C# out the door but like any child it has some growing up to do.
Really? You are way too young to be developing "healthy fears". Java, like *every other language, has its issues but there is nothing abnormally nasty about it to treat it like a plague. Specifically relating to your
As many of these posts have mentioned: Don't limit yourself. Try everything. Obviously for Linux purposes knowing C (and a healthy amount of Bash scripting and Perl) is useful purely because the OS is built on it BUT for developing applications on top of it many languages have benefits depending on what you are trying to implement and so eliminating anything from your list will hurt you in the long run.
"Free your mind and the rest will follow"
-En Vogue
If something like indentation is a show-stopper for your choice of language, then you are missing the point.
Computer languages are about data structures and idioms for manipulating them efficiently. In contrast, whitespace is a cosmetic, superficial thing.
Yes, I adore Python. (I wish I had paid attention to it ten years sooner than I did.)
Managed code performance is good enough for essentially anything aside from high-performance video games (and even that isn't far off).
"Java is slow" is a stupid old myth. Does it not occur to you that JIT compilers compile to native code?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Everyone programming for Linux should start with C until they have a solid understanding of how the Von Neumann architecture really works. Once you "get" virtual/physical memory, compilation of C into IL, IL into assembler, and how linkage works, start toying with POSIX threads. Once you really understand the tradeoffs and performance implications of things like dynamic binding and certain aspects of object oriented programming, you can move up to something like Ruby or Python and *really* understand not only what you are doing, but what that interpreter is doing for you.
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I am mostly an Assembly Language programmer and it can teach some bad habits. I don't generally trust anybody else's code, so end up coding up everything from scratch. It's a solitary practice. That said, 'pointers' and other things that seem weird and remote to many people are painfully obvious if you started out in Assembly.
Bare hardware and real memory addresses rule. However, a bare-metal assembly language programmer will mostly work with embedded controllers in this day and age. Yay for the little 8 bitters and even the 4 bitters. There are still billions being deployed.
Another thing that C has going for it is that virtually all Linux apps are written in C. So, if you ever want to install anything from source, and something goes wrong, you'll be glad you know a thing or two about C so you can figure it out (and even submit a patch that ends up being applied to a big, established project like WINE - that's a pretty awesome feeling, let me tell you). All *other* languages interpreters are written in C - it's always worthwhile once you've gotten comfortable with a language like Java to sit down and write your own interpreter in C so you can really get a good feel for what it's actually doing.
So, yeah, I second the parent. Definitely C.
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and these days when I need to write in C I generally end up writing a fair amount of code to manually re-implement functionality that I would get 'for free' in C++.
Odds are you're ignoring one of the true fundamental virtues of programming: Reusability.
You see, when you have a rock stable ABI, like C affords you, you can create these things called "Libraries", which future products can then depend on, often times even in other languages like Python and Java. And those products can then be depended on, and so on and so forth until you have a whole working system.
I laugh every time I hear someone say something like "Oh C++ has [blah] "for free"". No, you don't have it for free, someone else just coded it, stuck it in your fat C++ library and now 10 years later people bicker about whether it was actually the right approach to standardize so much of this crap, when so many different "standard libraries" are so totally and hopelessly incompatible.
C's standard library is so spartan that you can write your own "standard library" full of goodies like lists and queues and trees and other time savers, and you never have to get into such arguments to begin with.
Or, if you're incredibly lazy, you can use some of the community maintained, amazing C libraries that already exist. My personal favorite happens to be GLib, but anyone who's written enough code in C to have an opinion on the subject has probably written one of their own or come across one they like as well (such as eGLib in Mono, the Apache Portable Runtime Library in Apache, and the list just curls on...)
So yeah, all of that stuff was added to C++ because it was useful... Just as long as you're working on one project, with one version of [OS], with one compiler...
I too have a healthy fear of Java, but that is changing.
I feel it VERY important to state that Java apps as a general rule are bloated crap.
I also feel it VERY important to state that Windows apps as a general rule are bloated crap.
I used to avoid Java like the plague due to the slow bloated feel of the apps I had used. Fortunately, recently I was forced to write a Java servlet because a library for that I wanted to use was a java library and it was the only one with a license acceptable to the project I was working on.
In the course of writing the Java servlet I came to learn that Java and the JVM aren't the problem, its just the poorly written apps that I've seen. I meantioned Windows above because it suffers from the same misconception to most non-techies (techies have their own more legitimate reasons for disliking it). Most Windows (and Java) developers suck. They aren't developers, they are people who wrote an app for some other reason. Whatever that reason my be isn't important. Whats important is that we see a lot of crappy Java and Windows apps because those are things that lots of people have easy access to. Pretty much EVERYONE has a Windows machine of some sort they can use, and most of those Windows machines hava JVM. Since you can easily setup a Windows or Java development machine for little to no cost or technical ability, the barrier to entry is low enough that those non-developers can write bad apps that give the language (or OS) a name as a poor performer, when in reality, 99% of the time, the app is the issue, not the engine under it.
I write this post as a former Java hater, who now maintains a servlet that services hundreds of thousands of hits a day, certainly not the biggest web app by any standard but it is a high performance application doing image manipulation in 'real time' for its end users. I still think you should learn C (C++ is good as well, but do C first IMO and you stand a better chance of using object oriented languages properly rather than abusively), but if you are a good programmer, Java can be an excellent language and runtime enviroment to build on. I would not have wanted to write my web servlet in C or C++ in this case.
So for the Java haters, just think about why you hate Java. Do you hate it because of the shitty apps you've used, or because there REALLY is an actually problem with it?
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