Exploring programming language basics
Most companies lean heavily toward a specific language or set of languages, depending on what the code is used for. Server-side applications in enterprise settings tend to prefer Java, whereas machine learning (ML) applications perform fairly well in functional languages or hybrid languages such as Python. Whichever language you find yourself closest to, you should learn the basics of that language. If the team you work with heavily uses a functional language and you only know object-oriented (OO) languages, use this as an opportunity to bridge the gap and learn the fundamentals of functional programming. There are books on both language types referenced in the Further reading section of this chapter to go into more detail but I’ll cover some of the basics here.
As a brief recap, OO programming (OOP) is a language paradigm where the application is defined by a series of objects that can interact with each other. An object consists of...
