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what is the most relevant programming language for ee?
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rstofer:

--- Quote from: Karel on November 04, 2018, 12:12:27 pm ---C language is the most important language for EE's.
Apart from that, it's the second most used language in the world. Only Java is more popular.

--- End quote ---

I'm not sure 'popular' is the right word for Java.  Java is used in cell phones and there are a bunch of phones.  As a result, Java is probably the most 'executed' language, perhaps not the language with the most programmers.  I think we get into a semantic battle when discussing the 'popularity' of Java. 

In terms of application programming, I would expect C++ to be the most used (have the most programmers).  I imagine C# will become important and when I want a widget in a hurry, Visual Basic is the way to get it built.

In the end, a language is just a methodology for expressing an idea.  It's the idea that's important, not the implementation.  Sure, the implementation gets all the accolades but almost every idea can be programmed in almost every language.

Bottom line:  Learn to express the ideas and worry less about the language.  Your employer is going to tell you what language to use.  Therefore, you need to know all of the top languages (C, C++, Java, Python) and it wouldn't hurt to know the second tier as well (Fortran, Pascal, Perl, Ruby, Rust, Visual {Basic, C++, #}, <whatever>).

For the practicing EE, I still expect C to be the most important tool in the toolbox.
Karel:

--- Quote from: rstofer on November 04, 2018, 04:10:36 pm ---Your employer is going to tell you what language to use.

--- End quote ---

Not in my case. I decide which tools to use. That's including the programming language.
Do I exclude myself from many job opportunities? Definitely yes.
Am I happy with the jobs that are left for me? Definitely yes. At least because I'm in control.
rstofer:

--- Quote from: brucehoult on November 04, 2018, 11:09:41 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on November 04, 2018, 09:25:09 am ---Don't focus on the language; they change regularly and will continue to change throughout your career.

--- End quote ---

Not really. I first programmed in C in 1983 and C++ in 1988 and those are still what 95% of my work in operating systems, compilers and interpreters and JITs, runtime libraries, and embedded programming use, 30 to 35 years later.

Most of the other 5% is bash/grep/sort/etc/perl. Perl is 30 years old and Perl 5 24 years. The unix utilities are 35 to 40+ years old.

And I do all my editing in emacs. It's similar vintage.

I'd say you can't go wrong learning those tools. They're going to be here forever, even if there is something else that comes into popularity from time to time.

--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.

--- End quote ---
Tony Hoare
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/721008

More to the point:

--- Quote ---You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.

--- End quote ---
Tony Hoare
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/592444

One of the true luminaries in CS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare

And EVERYBODY needs to be able to use the 'vi' editor.
Beamin:
Can you get away without learning a programming language and still be relevant in the field after school to employers?

I thought everyone was going to hands down say C since micro controllers run that. Or am I mistaken? Is C++ to C like Spanish is to Italian?
tggzzz:

--- Quote from: Beamin on November 04, 2018, 04:33:50 pm ---I thought everyone was going to hands down say C since micro controllers run that. Or am I mistaken?

--- End quote ---

Computers, of whatever size, do not run languages.

Computers use hardware to interpret the numbers in memory; the interpretation is the computation and hopefully that computation produces useful side effects.

There are many ways by which those numbers can be selected, including by hand - as anybody that has manually bootstrapped a computer knows.
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