Welcome back.
I wanted to answer this question that I get a lot of even from professional developers that have been
in the field for years.
So I want to tackle this question really quickly right now.
Why are there so many programming languages?
Why can we just have one language that does everything and everybody's happy and we don't have to worry
about learning so many programming languages?
And here's the thing.
In your career, you don't need to know five, ten, eight languages.
No.
You can be a really successful developer programmer with just one language, just finding that speciality
of yours and programming languages like Python, Java and JavaScript offer a lot of opportunities where
you don't need to learn another language.
But why are there so many languages?
If we go to Wikipedia, these are the list of programming languages.
And if you're looking through here, you should be intimidated because there's no way in your lifetime
you're going to learn all of these and well, you won't.
Most likely you're going to learn one, two, maybe three languages in your entire lifespan or career
as a programmer.
And different programming languages are good for different things, just like we have different tools
to, let's say, build a house.
You can't just build a house with a hammer.
You need different tools that are good at different things to assemble what you want.
So it's impossible to build one ultimate language when we have so many applications, so many mobile
phones, so many computers, so many devices like cameras.
So you have low level languages that we've talked about, like assembly code or CE, and then we have
higher level languages like Python and JavaScript.
Now here's the thing.
Python is usually slower than languages like C++ or C sharp or even Java.
And we don't need to get into technical details here.
But I do want to tell you about our trade off.
You see, you don't really want to write Python code for low level systems and hardware interactions.
If you're taking this course, well, you're probably not even interested in that field.
You see, Python, although slower than some languages, is good at one thing and does this really,
really well.
That is developer productivity because Python is so easy to learn or at least is very similar to the
English language.
It's become really, really popular for developers to be productive and write code really, really fast
and less lines than something like C.
So a print hello world for example in Python would take well, just one line, but all languages have
their different strength.
For example, if you want to build an app on Android or an iOS device, well you're not really going
to use Python.
But if you want to do machine learning, maybe you want to build a web server, maybe you want to do
data visualizations, build scripts that process thousands of Excel files.
Well, in that case, you're going to use Python and we're going to cover what different things you
can do with Python and what Python is really, really good at in this course as we explore different
projects later on.
But keep that in mind.
The reason there are so many programming languages is that every programming language excels at some
things and well doesn't do so well at others.
It's all about trade off.
There is no ultimate language, and if a programmer tells you, Hey, my language is the best language.
They're probably junior developers that don't know what they're talking about.
Everything is a pro and con.
Everything has a trade off.
And as programmers, what really good senior programmers do is being able to detect what these pros
and cons are and what tool to use for a specific problem, something that throughout this course I'm
going to try and teach.
I'll see you in the next one.
Bye bye.