Preferred Programming Language

[jkoritzinsky]

Originally Posted by Jaci

Guys, all we're doing now is discussing edge cases that can affect a programmers experience. To any outside observers viewing this thread, we're just confusing them more.

The answer isn't as simple as "in 0.1% of cases, this will happen in X language, so therefore, you MUST use Y language". The answer to the question "which language should I use" isn't black and white. Each language has its own pros and cons, and where it fits in in the grand scheme of thing. If they didn't, we wouldn't have thousands of different languages in existence today.

Referring back to OP, they want to know what language will prepare you for the real world, not which language is easiest to learn. You don't do FRC because it's easy to learn, it's hard to learn, hence "Hard Fun". If you want to be good at something, it will take hard work. If you want to be prepared for the industry, it takes hard work.

Let's try not to deviate from the question and answer what the OP wants to know, and hopefully, the reason most of you are here - what will prepare you for the future industry?

From my limited experience, here's what I've realized about each language. I am probably wrong somewhere in here, so please correct me if I am.

LabVIEW: Industrial hardware. Primarily used in (non-SW or borderline non-SW) engineering roles. As a SW person, it has the least utility (in terms of usage in SW roles).

C++: High performance, high throughput computing. Used in low level (firmware), low latency (market trading, game dev), large calculation (ex. CAD, High throughput computing, supercomputers), and other projects that require the strength of C++. Also used in many other scenarios such as general business applications (usually "legacy" projects at this point), and mobile apps (cross platform ironically enough).

Java: General business applications, "enterprisiey" systems, web-backend code (sometimes), Android.

C#/.NET: Similar to Java, but more web-backend and lacks Android (w/o Xamarin tools). Some game dev with Unity engine.

Python: General business apps, utility scripts, some large calculation (with numpy), web-backend code.

There are many other categories I haven't covered, but this is a general idea. Basically, everything but LabVIEW will be great experience for a wide variety of programming careers. Of the current languages, C++ is the only one that will get you into the embedded firmware, high throughput computing scene, but Python is making some gains in some of the C++ space (not much in the real time systems or top tier game dev though).