When you’re programming, what kind of programmer do you want to be?
Many programmers want to be the “best”: the best in their team, the best in their company and maybe even the best in the world.
When you look at how people go about becoming really good programmers there are some common traits amongst them.
High level programming languages are often associated with newer programmers and with junior roles. However, in this blog post I’m going to show you that it’s possible to become an expert using high level programming languages.
What’s a high level language?
There is no standard definition of a high level language but we can use Wikipedia’s definition: “In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer.” In other words, a high level language abstracts away many of the low level details that make computers work. This makes them easier to use than low level languages but they often come with performance penalties as a result.
High level languages tend to be more portable across different platforms (e.g. Windows vs Linux) than low level languages which are usually targeted at just one type of platform (e.g. C++ for Windows). This is because most of the low level
I get asked a lot about whether someone can make a career using a high-level programming language. The answer is that it depends on what you mean by “high-level”.
High level programming languages are, at the end of the day, all about abstraction. They abstract over various lower-level details in order to provide a better experience for you as a programmer.
There’s nothing wrong with this — any tool worth using abstracts over some low-level detail to improve your experience. A good chef knife doesn’t just let you cut vegetables, but it makes cutting vegetables easier and cleaner than if you used your bare hands or a stone knife. A good web browser hides the details of HTTP requests and SSL handshakes and makes loading pages easy with a click of a button. You don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car around town.
Just because something is abstracted away doesn’t mean it isn’t there anymore though! When you drive your car around town, there are still pistons inside the engine block moving up and down, creating little explosions that push the wheels around.
Similarly, when you use a high-level programming language like Ruby
A high level programming language, as the name suggests, is a programming language that offers a higher level of abstraction than low-level languages like assembly or machine language. There are all sorts of high level programming languages available, but the main differences between them are the types of tasks they’re designed to perform. For example, PHP is designed specifically for creating websites and web applications. Python, on the other hand, is a general purpose programming language that can be used to create just about anything.
High level programming languages are usually much easier to work with than low-level languages because they allow you to use more human-readable words and phrases instead of having to remember lots of codes and symbols. High level languages also allow you to program in a much more elegant manner by using things like variables (which are used to store values), loops (which allow you to repeat certain actions), and conditionals (which allow you to choose different paths based on certain conditions).
There are some drawbacks to high level programming languages though; one being that they are often slower than low-level languages because they need to be translated into machine code before they can be executed by your computer’s processor. In addition, some high level programming languages lack features like pointers or memory management that
A high-level programming language is a programming language that abstracts from the details of the computer. It is “high-level” since it is several steps removed from the actual code run on a computer’s processor. High-level languages are usually “compiled” into lower level languages (often assembly language or machine code) which are then “assembled” into executable programs by utilities such as assemblers and linkers. There can be multiple layers of intermediate levels between the high-level language and the low-level language; for example, C– is an intermediate language used to create code for high-performance embedded systems.
High level programming languages tend to be easier to program in than low level languages, because they are closer to natural languages and further from machine languages. To write programs in low level languages, programmers have to know many technical details about the computer such as how much memory it has and how to manipulate its registers. Programs written in a high-level programming language can be executed directly by the computer’s interpreter or compiler, or may be translated into machine code by a compiler or assembler before being executed.
In the beginning of the modern era, there were two competing programming paradigms: imperative and functional. Both of these paradigms were supported by high-level languages. The imperative style was supported by languages like Pascal and C, and the functional style was supported by languages like ML and Lisp.
In practice, things didn’t work out so well for functional programming. The languages that became widely used were all imperative. As a result, most programmers today think of programming as a fundamentally imperative activity. They use imperative constructs even in situations where a functional approach would be more natural, because they don’t realize such an approach is possible.
Is this situation likely to change?
I think it’s unlikely to change significantly in the next few years. But I do think it will change eventually. There have been two waves of language design in the last 50 years:
The first wave (1950s-1970s) was largely devoted to making high-level languages that could be used for writing systems programs (i.e., compilers and operating systems). In this context, it made sense to emphasize low-level control constructs like while loops and pointers, because you really do need those things to write compilers and operating systems. It also made sense to emphasize efficiency over
The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you’re doing. Because once you think you know what you’re doing, you stop looking around for other ways of doing things. And I think the key is in not trying to force yourself on anybody else’s terms but constantly trying to make those terms better.
So, one of the things that I really love about my job and that I never get bored with is that, believe it or not, I spend a lot of time thinking about how things work and how they could work better.
I don’t think about how to do something; I think about how to do something better. And sometimes this means reinventing the way we do things from scratch. A fresh start can be a scary thing if you let it be, but it can also give us a rare opportunity to reimagine things from the ground up and pursue new ways of working together.
Sometimes when people say they want more than just an iterative improvement, they really want a new world order.
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
Deliberate practice is crucial for great performance. But deliberate practice by itself isn’t enough. You can use it to get good at almost anything–shooting free throws or playing the violin or designing chips. But if you want to be great, you also need a particular kind of opportunity. You have to be able to try and fail, and learn from your mistakes, in conditions that are close to the real thing–what sports psychologists call “game conditions.”
The problem with most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Success consists of going from failure to failure