Which language should we program in

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Third is the fact that, in the future, most of the world of software engineering will move to graphical methods. In my world, in automotive electronics, almost all of the software we 'write' is in graphical languages: Simulink, Stateflow, Statemate, Altia, etc. If we want to prepare these kids fo the future, we should pick our methods according to what they are likely to need someday.

Have any actual proof of this? There are certainly tasks and specific industries where graphical methods are the norm... but there are also tasks and industries where it most definitely is NOT the norm. Almost every major website you interact with is done through "traditional" programming, one line at a time. The video games kids play is done the same way. The iPhones or Android phones everyone carries are programmed the same way.

Where I work (in the medical device industry), all of our consumer products are prepared in C or Java. Some of our manufacturing and testing labs use visual languages, but a vast majority of our programmers spend every day looking at and writing lines of code, not connecting the dots in a visual interface.

My resume states I have experience in Java, C (and all the variants and successors of C), and Labview, along wiht some other languages. However, all of the calls I've gotten from recruiters browsing Linked-in want me for either Java or C related jobs. I haven't had anyone call and ask if I would be interested in a labview job.