What are the best programming languages for IoT (Internet of Things)?

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What are the best programming languages for IoT (Internet of Things)?

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Aug 19, 2022

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9 Options Considered

Best programming languages for IoT (Internet of Things)	Price	Current stable version	Platforms
51 Python	-	3.9.1	Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS
-- C++	-	-	-
-- C	-	C'18	-
-- Lua	-	-	Windows, Mac, Android, Linux
-- Java	-	10	-

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score 33 · Answer 1

Python

Top Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Con

Slow performance

Python is interpreted, so it's slower than C/C++/Rust/Go. See More

ndrewxie's Experience

Python is good for quick developing / prototyping, but if you want to develop real world, reliable and industrial strength IoT applications, python is not ideal. It's slow, cannot do low level operations quickly and is dynamically typed. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.9.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

Language type:Interpreted

See All Specs

Top Pro

Quick development

Python, because of it's syntax and a large number of libraries, it's excellent for quick prototyping. See More

Top Con

Unable to communicate directly with hardware

Python cannot do low level operations without FFI, which is a large overhead and is slow. See More

Top Pro

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. See More

Top Con

Dynamically typed

Dynamic typing reduces type safety, making it unsuitable for highly reliable applications. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Python's syntax is very clear and readable, making it excellent for beginners. The lack of extra characters like semicolons and curly braces reduces distractions, letting beginners focus on the meaning of the code. Significant whitespace also means that all code is properly and consistently indented. The language also uses natural english words such as 'and' and 'or', meaning that beginners need to learn fewer obscure symbols. On top of this, Python's dynamic type system means that code isn't cluttered with type information, which would further distract beginners from what the code is doing. See More

Top Con

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

While it's a good language to learn and use after you have mastered a couple of other less rigid programming languages, it's definitely not good for first-time learners. Both the language itself and its community have made it quite clear that you should do everything the "Pythonic way" to get the best results, that it feels more like an opinionated framework instead of a general-purpose programming language, which means if you are a first-time learner and getting too "tuned" to the "Pythonic way" it will be much harder for you to learn other less-opinionated languages compared to the other way around. Like any programming languages and/or frameworks, it's recommend for the first-time learners to learn less opinionated ones first to open up your mind, then learn some of the more opinionated ones to increase productivity for specific fields of works. After all, programming languages are just some utilities for the human mind to interface with the computers, and there are more suitable tools for different tasks, and you should master the "Pythonic way" (after you already have adequate experience in computer programming) instead of locking your mind too close to the "Pythonic way" as a first-time learner. See More

Top Pro

Python has strength in the embedded devices space

Python has strength in the embedded devices space and allows the developers to build IoT applications with comprehensible data mining results. See More

Top Con

Speed can matter

Python, like many interpreted and untyped languages, is fairly slow compared to compiled languages like C, C++ or Java. Sometimes this won't matter, but when it does you're talking about twenty times slower than C/C++ and ten times slowed than Java. You need to have a plan for what you will do if it is too slow. See More

Top Pro

Robust package ecosystem

Python has an excellent standard library, as well as an immense and weathered ecosystem of packages available in the Python Package Index. This helps developers bridge the gap between the real world and the Internet with minimal coding. See More

Top Con

Limited support for functional programming

While Python imports some very useful and elegant bits and pieces from FP (such as list comprehensions, higher-order functions such as map and filter), the language's support for FP falls short of the expectations raised by included features. For example, no tail call optimisation or proper lambdas. Referential transparency can be destroyed in unexpected ways even when it seems to be guaranteed. Function composition is not built into the core language, etc. See More

Top Pro

With numba can reach to processing speed similar to C/C++

In scientific computing using numba is possible to reach to high speed in calculations. See More

Top Con

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Although the principals of multi-threading in Python are good, the simplicity can be deceptive and multi-threaded applications are not always easy to create when multiple additional factors are accounted for. Multi-thread processes have to be explicitly created manually. See More

Top Pro

Easy to find jobs

Python's popularity also means that it's commonly in use in production at many companies - it's even one of the primary languages in use at Google. Furthermore, as a concise scripting language, it's very commonly used for smaller tasks, as an alternative to shell scripts. Python was also designed to make it easy to interface with other languages such as C, and so it is often used as 'glue code' between components written in other languages. See More

Top Con

Not good for mobile development

You can use frameworks like Kivy, but if your ultimate goal is to write mobile apps Python may not be the best first choice. See More

Top Pro

Very similar to pseudo-code

When learning Computer Science concepts such as algorithms and data structures, many texts use pseudo-code. Having a language such as Python whose syntax is very similar to pseudo-code is an obvious advantage that makes learning easier. See More

Top Pro

One right way to do things

One of the Guiding Principles of Python is that there should be only one obvious way to do things. This is helpful for beginners because it means that there is likely a best answer for questions about how things should be done. See More

Top Pro

Good introduction to datatypes

Python's built-in support and syntax for common collection types such as lists, dictionaries, and sets, as well as supporting features like list comprehensions, foreach loops, map, filter, and others, makes their use much easier to get into for beginners. Python's support for Object Orient Programming, but with dynamic typing, also makes the topic of Data Structures much more accessible, as it takes the focus off of more tedious aspects, such as type casting and explicitly defined interfaces. Python's convention of only hiding methods through prefacing them with underscores further takes the focus off of details such as Access Modifiers common in languages such as Java and C++, allowing beginners to focus on the core concepts, without much worry for language specific implementation details. See More

Top Pro

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Python is commonly used in data science and has many libraries for scientific computing, such as numpy, pandas, matplotlib, etc. See More

Top Pro

Advanced community projects

There are outstanding projects being actively developed in Python. Projects such as the following to name a random four: Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. iPython: a rich architecture for interactive computing with shells, a notebook and which is embeddable as well as wrapping and able to wrap libraries written in other languages. Mercurial: a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface. PyPy: a fast, compliant alternative implementation of the Python language (2.7.3 and 3.2.3) with several advantages and distinct features including a Just-in-Time compiler for speed, reduced memory use, sandboxing, micro-threads for massive concurrency, ... When you move on from being a learner you can still stay with Python for those advanced tasks. See More

Top Pro

Supports various programming paradigms

Python supports three 'styles' of programming: Procedural programming. Object orientated programming. Functional programming. All three styles can be seamlessly interchanged and can be learnt in harmony in Python rather than being forced into one point of view, which is helpful for easing confusion over the debate amongst programmers over which programming paradigm is best, as developers will get the chance to try all of them. See More

Top Pro

Can be used in many domains

Python can be used across virtually all domains: scientific, network, games, graphics, animation, web development, machine learning, and data science. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Installs and works on every major operating systems if not already installed by default (Linux, macOS). See More

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

Python has an active and helpful community, such as the comp.lang.python Google Groups, StackOverflow, reddit, etc. See More

Top Pro

Comes with extensive libraries

Python ships with a large standard library, including modules for everything from writing graphical applications, running servers, and doing unit testing. This means that beginners won't need to spend time searching for tools and libraries just to get started on their projects. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

The Python community has put a lot of work into creating excellent documentation filled with plain english describing functionality. Contrast this with other languages, such as Java, where documentation often contains a dry enumeration of the API. As a random example, consider GUI toolkit documentation - the tkinter documentation reads almost like a blog article, answering questions such as 'How do I...', whereas Java's Swing documentation contains dry descriptions that effectively reiterate the implementation code. On top of this, most functions contain 'Doc Strings', which mean that documentation is often immediately available, without even the need to search the internet. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get started

On top of the wealth of tutorials and documentation, and the fact that it ships with a sizeable standard library, Python also ships with both an IDE (Integrated Development Environment: A graphical environment for editing running and debugging your code); as well as a text-based live interpreter. Both help users to get started trying out code immediately, and give users immediate feedback that aids learning. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials

Python's popularity and beginner friendliness has led to a wealth of tutorials and example code on the internet. This means that when beginners have questions, they're very likely to be able to find an answer on their own just by searching. This is an advantage over some languages that are not as popular or covered as in-depth by its users. See More

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score 11 · Answer 2

C++

Top Con

Module system is not great

C++ uses the #include mechanism provided by C. Which unfortunately is a poor way of accessing the API of a library. Some of the reasons why the module system is weak are: Compile time scalability: The compiler must preprocess every header included in a file, and every header included in those headers. This process must be repeated for every translation unit in the program. As can be imagined, this doesn't scale very well. For each header added you are increasing the compilation time exponentially. Fragile: modules included are treated as textual imports by the compiler. This causes all sorts of problems since they are subject to any macro definitions in the time of the inclusion. If any of these macro definitions collide with a name in the library it can break the library API . See More

Top Pro

Excellent compiler optimization

Both open source compilers (such as Clang and GCC), and proprietary ones (like Intel's and Microsoft's) are very good at analyzing program flow and program optimization. This is mostly due to the widespread usage of C/C++ applications running everything from mobile/desktop/server Operating Systems, to search engines and webserver software, and the demand for performance. See More

Specs

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

Top Con

C++ succumbs under its own weight

The years of cramped backward compatibility start to show in the syntax, complexity and very top-heavy language structures. Trying to keep up with far more elegant languages like C# doesn't do C++ any good either, because the committee always seems to be able to mess it up. After numerous years, still no modules... you must be kidding! See More

Top Pro

Unrivalled performance amongst high-level languages

Since C++ has a policy of zero cost abstractions, great care is taken to implement every feature, so it uses the absolute minimum of computational resources. Also you don't pay (computationally) for language features, that you don't use. Template meta-programming is a technique, that allows to delegate some decisions in your program to compile time, so your generated assembly is highly specialized and optimized. See More

Top Con

Retains nearly all bad habits of C

Top Pro

C code can be used in C++ code

Most C code will work as C++. See More

Top Con

Huge language gets in the way of learning

C++ is such an atrociously over-complicated language that its learning curve may get in the way of learning fundamentals. Learning C++ well is a ten-year project, and even experts are frequently surprised by the language. See More

Top Pro

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. See More

Top Pro

Huge language supports most everything

C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++ See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 3

C

Top Pro

Portable

C is portable between most hardware. Generally a C compiler is made for any new architecture, and already exists for existing architectures. C is portable between all operating systems (Windows, UNIX and Mac) and only needs a program to be recompiled to work. This allows anyone on any operating system to learn about the language and not be held back by intricacies of their operating system. With this said, C's portability these days is not quite what it used to be. Much of said portability relies on the POSIX standard in particular, and as time passes, the compliance of a given system with that standard is becoming less certain; especially in the case of Linux. Most things will still be portable (or at least emulatable) between Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD for example; but you will at times need to make use of platform-specific support libraries for certain individual cases, as well. See More

Top Con

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Header files are a poor man's implementation of modules. Modern programming languages make use of modules which eliminate the need for C includes and header files and the many issues caused by them, such as the complete lack of dependency checking. Header files often contain even more include statements that point to other header files which also point to even more which drastically increases compile time. Modules only have to be compiled once, and when importing those modules into your software project, you only have to pull in the module that you are using, which is often times already precompiled. This way, the compiler knows exactly what it needs before beginning to compile your project and can automatically compile the few dependencies it needs in advance rather than recursively compiling every header file it runs across as in C. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

Standard:ISO/IEC 9899:2011/Cor 1:2012 or C11

Typing discipline:static

Paradigm:imperative

See All Specs

Top Pro

Helps with learning other languages later

A lot of languages used in the industry have a C-like syntax (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP) and starting with C will help new developers to be familiar with it's syntax and by extensions with the syntax of many popular languages. See More

Top Con

Low-level

Depending on the purpose this can be either a pro or a con. If the task is to learn how to program, low-level of C will impend learning important concepts. Furthermore, C is rather limited in ways of building abstractions. "Low-levelness" of C can be a pro feature in learning system programming. See More

Top Pro

Understanding of computers

Learning C forces you to grapple with the low-level workings of your computer (memory management, pointers, etc.) in ways that the other languages abstract away. Without an understanding of these low-level aspects of computer programming you will be limited if you try to develop an application that needs to run in a memory or performance constrained environment. Other languages like Python can obscure a lot of details, so your foundation may be weaker. See More

Top Con

It's hard to write complicated software

It's hard to write complicated software. See More

Top Con

Favorable for the spread of viruses and DDOS attacks leveraging IoT

Writing portable code is harder than writing prototypes for a specific architecture. The language is high-level enough to create inefficient programs ( and spending resources ), and simultaneously too low-level to make the device dangerous to use. See More

See All

score 8 · Answer 4

Lua

Top Pro

Very easy to integrate with C and C++

One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game. Finally, Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages. See More

Top Con

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Android, Linux

Top Pro

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming. The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics: Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)). Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()). See More

Top Con

Batteries not included

Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight. See More

Top Pro

It's embeddable

Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use. See More

Top Con

Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages

Lua features a prototype-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages. Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages. See More

Top Pro

It's portable

Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler. Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation). When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K. The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers. See More

Top Pro

Portable

Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler. Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation). When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K. The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers. See More

Top Pro

Embeddable

Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use. See More

Top Pro

Simple

Easy to learn. See More

Top Pro

Smallest footprint among all main Languages (~128KB) which makes Lua able to run in very small processors with very fast speed

Top Pro

It has great documentation

The official Lua documentation is very helpful and thorough. There are also a large number of online resources or books with lots of helpful information for beginners and advanced users alike. See More

Top Pro

It's fast

Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can: Implement critical parts in C; Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop-in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page: LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C. See More

Top Pro

There's a helpful community

Due to the growing popularity, Lua has a rather large and helpful community surrounding it. See More

See All

score 8 · Answer 5

Java

Top Con

Long learning curve

Top Pro

Akka runs here

Specs

Current stable version:10

Site:https://www.java.com

Price:Open source (free)

Top Con

Slow and heavy

Too far from the machine hardware. See More

Top Pro

Fantastic IDEs

Because Java is statically typed, integrated development environments (IDEs) for Java can provide a lot more feedback on errors you will encounter. Java IDEs can give you specific errors in the location where they occur without having to run the code every time. This makes is faster to debug and learn from your mistakes. IDEs also have extensive auto complete capabilities that can help you learn the programming libraries you are using faster and tell you what functions are available. See More

Top Con

Garbage collection may teach bad habits

Java is a garbage collected language and it does not force programmers to think about memory allocation and management for their programs. This is fine most of the time. However, it may cause some difficulties in adjusting to a non-GC language (such as C for example), where memory management needs to be done manually. But if good coding practices and habits are followed, this shouldn't be much of a problem. See More

Top Con

Half-baked generics

Type erasure means it doesn't even exist at runtime. The whole generics system is confusing for beginners. See More

Top Con

Lacks modern features

Java evolves very slowly - lambda expressions weren't available until Java 8 (which is not available on Android), and despite getters/setters being a long-time convention, the language still doesn't have native accessor syntax (a la C#'s properties). It's unlikely newer, popular features like list comprehensions or disjoint union types will be available anytime soon. While not strictly required for novice programmers, these make problems more complicated and tedious than they need to be - for example, when a simple local function would do, (portable) Java demands anonymous inner classes, an interface and a class, or worse, no abstraction at all. See More

Top Con

Confusing mis-features

Some features in Java can be quite confusing for beginners. Encapsulation is needlessly obfuscated with a confusing access control model. As an example, the "protected" keyword not only grants access to child classes, but to the entire package. Since small programs are written as one package, it becomes functionally equivalent to "public". In OOP, everything is supposed to be an object, but, in Java, primitive types such as integers, booleans and characters are not, and must be handled as special cases. Java continues to lack many high-level features, and, particularly prior to Java 7, compensated by adding confusing Java-only features, such as anonymous subclasses. Some example code is unreadable without knowing a special-case feature, libraries differ in style based on when they were released or what platform they target(e.g., Android vs. Desktop), and some solutions just aren't available on some platforms. See More

Top Con

Locks you into the static OOP mindset

Top Con

Too verbose

A Hello world needs package, class, static method and the actual printf. Reading a line from input requires instatiating 5 objects in the right order. Exceptions are everywhere, particularly since all values are nullable. Java has a getter/setter culture, but without native syntax support. portable Java code lacks anonymous functions, and continues to lack good support for partial application, compensating instead with verbose design patterns, kludges like anonymous inner classes, or just inline code. It is statically typed without type inference, with a culture that promotes long class names. Poor support for sum-types and pattern matching leads to overuse of inheritance for dynamic dispatch and chains of nested conditionals Especially for beginners, this can make reading Java code feel overwhelming; most Java courses tell students to simply copy, paste, and ignore a significant percentage of the code until they've learned enough to understand what it means. For experienced programmers, this makes Java feel tedious, especially without an IDE, and actively discourages some solutions and some forms of abstraction. See More

Top Con

Worst-of-both-worlds static type system

It's just barely good enough to make decent IDEs, but it's not at the level of Idris or even Haskell. For large enterprise projects, the IDE support is important, but the static typing in Java just gets in the way for the smaller projects beginners would start with. Python is duck typed and this makes small programs easy to develop quickly, but the price is that you have to write unit tests to avoid breaking larger programs. In contrast, you can be reasonably certain that a program that actually compiles in Idris does what you want, because assertions are built into the powerful type system. Java can't make that claim and still requires unit tests. Java has the worst of both worlds because of its poor static type system. See More

Top Con

Static typing but no type inference

The type system gets in your way more than it helps. Heavy IDE support is absolutely required for reasonable productivity. This means beginners have to learn not just the language, but eventually a complex, heavyweight IDE too. See More

See All

score 9 · Answer 6

Kotlin

Top Pro

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself. See More

Top Con

Native compilers are not yet mature

JetBrains are working hard on native compilers, but they are not yet officially released. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.3

Top Pro

Great tooling support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc... See More

Top Con

May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin

Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background. See More

Top Pro

No runtime overhead

The standard library is relatively small and tight. It mostly consists of focused extensions of the Java standard library and as such adds no additional runtime overhead to existing Java projects. See More

Top Con

Not enough tools and libraries compared to JavaScript and Python

Top Pro

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference. See More

Top Con

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design. See More

Top Pro

JVM and Native compilation

Projects on Kotlin can be compiled into JVM bytecode and native applications for iOS, Mac, Windows and *NIX See More

Top Pro

Multi platform support

With multi platform support the same base library/object definitions can be shared between on-board application and mobile application for iOS, Android and even desktop. See More

Top Pro

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

Kotlin runs on the JVM and Java interoperability has been one of the main objectives since the language was born. It runs everywhere Java does; web servers, mobile devices (Android), and desktop applications. It also works with all the major tools in the Java ecosystem like Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Spring Boot, etc. All of this makes adoption extremely easy even for existing Java projects. On top of this there's also ensured Type safety and less boilerplate code needed. See More

Top Pro

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either. See More

Top Pro

Is built to solve industrial problems

Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null. See More

Top Pro

Officially supported for Android development

Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch. This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++). See More

See All

score 9 · Answer 7

JavaScript

Top Pro

One language for the controller, server and web interface

Top Con

Interpreter

Interpretation vs. the execution of native code. See More

ModestComus's Experience

better than python for real-world Internet of things scenarios See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

Minimum Supported ECMAScript Version:ECMAScript 6 (Node v4.x-v10.x)

ECMAScript Modules:Available (as a flag) (only on Node 8.x-10.x)

See All Specs

Top Pro

Controller has a REPL

REPL allows you to experiment and debug directly on the controller without flashing and reboot. See More

Top Con

Dynamic typing

Dynamic typing disallows you to detect many errors before running the program. See More

Top Pro

Modern ESNext is far better than the JS of days past

Modern JS has made great strides, and can be targeted to older (or non-standard) browsers using Babel. There are new language constructs that can make programming in JS comfortable.; e.g.: async / await ( <3 ). See More

Top Con

Extremely unsafe and untrustworthy

JavaScript simply wasn't designed with safety in mind. There has been some recent improvements, but it's not enough. See More

Top Pro

Required for web development

If you are looking to create web projects, you will have to learn Javascript in order to develop the client side code. If you learn the foundations of programming in JavaScript you can reapply that education later in building web applications. See More

Top Pro

One of the most underestimated languages

deviously simple in syntax, yet highly powerful in paradigms, this language does not force you to the (actually intrinsically broken) object oriented paradigm, has a healthy dose of functional programming inside, and does not bloat the keyword space. Good javascript is all about structure. Bad javascript is all about lazy hipsters not taking the time to learn 'javascript, the good parts', a must read. See More

Top Pro

Prototype based Object Oriented System

Being object oriented, it supports the predominate and powerful programming approach. Being prototype based, it provides an intuitive approach to OOP. Whereas other popular languages use classes, which focus on thinking in the abstract, Javascript's prototypes allow you to focus on thinking in the concrete. For example, in a prototypical language, you think of a rectangle, and define it. You now have a rectangle. Let's say you want a red rectangle, you copy the rectangle and give it the property red. Want a blue one? Copy rectangle again give it a blue. Big blue rectangle? Copy blue rectangle and make it big. In a class-based language, first you describe a rectangle, describe a red rectangle as a type of rectangle, describe blue and big blue rectangles, and now that you have described them, you must create instances of them, and only then do you have the rectangles. Essentially: Classes are factories for objects, prototypes are objects themselves, and the latter method was created to be more intuitive, which is particularly advantageous to beginners. See More

Top Pro

First-class functions with lexical closures

While certainly not the only language with these features, this pro alone is so powerful that it compensates for most of JavaScript's problems. You'll learn to use closures and higher-order functions well in JavaScript, because you have to. And then you can generalize this knowledge to any other language that has these, and the good ones do. See More

Top Pro

No installation required

If you run a web browser you already have JavaScript installed and can get started right away. Modern browsers such as Chrome also have very powerful programming consoles built into them. Aside from the browser console, you can also use online Javascript playgrounds such as JS Bin and JS Fiddle. Even from a tablet. See More

Top Pro

High demand for JavaScript developers

If you're looking for a career as a developer, JavaScript is the place to focus your attention. There is a huge demand for good developers especially in frameworks such as React and Angular. See More

Top Pro

Javascript supports devices interoperability

JavaScript has a range of existing libraries, plugins, and APIs, many of which can be utilized in the Internet of Things. JavaScript utility libraries like Underscore.js, lodash, traverse and Async can be perfect to use in a range of common situations across different devices. There are some very powerful functions in the above modules that would be useful to IoT projects. See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous, event-driven and timers

Async built into the language and interpreter. Easy event-driven programming and code execution on a timer. See More

Top Pro

Massive ecosystem

JavaScript has one of the largest programming ecosystems, as shown by the being the most popular language for projects on GitHub. As there are so many projects written in JavaScript there are lots of libraries available to build off of and many of them are written to be easy to use and integrate into other projects. There are also lots of resources available for learning JavaScript. Other than traditional tutorials, language learning sites such as Codecademy have JavaScript courses. The Mozilla Developer Database also serves as a great resource for learning about the standard libraries built into JavaScript. See More

Top Pro

Several platforms to use the web stack and JS to create multi-platform apps

Opens the door to native application development as well as just websites. Use with React Native, Weex or Quasar (Vue), PhoneGap or Cordova, NativeScript, etc. to build native apps. Use mostly the same code base for multi-platform and web. See More

Top Pro

Supports server-side, micro-processors and even micro-controllers easily

Top Pro

Speed (most implementations)

JS/ES is in the running for the fastest interpreted language given the optimizations and JIT integration of popular implementations. On the other hand, it fails utterly when compared with compiled (to native or VM code) languages. See More

Top Pro

Very good debugger

Has a built-in debugger with break points, watches that work on local values, and a console that you can use to edit anything at any time. Both in the browser (eg: Chrome), and server (eg: Nodejs). See More

Top Pro

Can be very simple (teachable)

By setting a few ground-rules (effectively coding in a subset of JS), JS is one of the simplest languages to learn (requiring very few must-learn prerequisite concepts). See More

Top Pro

JSON

Modern JSON data interchange format including the Internet. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 8

Ada

Top Pro

Many sophisticated data types to represent bit level data

The exact bit level size of data types can be defined and accessed with normal Ada functions. Pointers are hardly ever required, but available if needed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, MacOS, embedded

Top Pro

Ada Driver Library covers many embedded systems and SBC

https://github.com/AdaCore/Ada_Drivers_Library See More

Top Pro

Allows safe embedded programming

Ada is a type safe language and it is rarely necessary to use pointers or other more error prone methods. The compiler can find many type errors. See More

Top Pro

Very readable syntax

Top Pro

Expressive types

See All

score 1 · Answer 9

Haskell

Top Pro

Easy to read

Haskell is a very terse language, particularly due to its type inference. This means there's nothing to distract from the intent of the code, making it very readable. This is in sharp contrast to languages like Java, where skimming code requires learning which details can be ignored. Haskell's terseness also lends itself to very clear inline examples in textbooks, and makes it a pleasure to read through code even on a cellphone screen. See More

Top Con

Too academic, hard to find "real world" code examples

Specs

Site:https://www.haskell.org/

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

See All

9 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Has features of both high and low level language

Slow performance

Quick development

Unable to communicate directly with hardware

It's really simple

Dynamically typed

Clear syntax

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

Python has strength in the embedded devices space

Speed can matter

Robust package ecosystem

Limited support for functional programming

With numba can reach to processing speed similar to C/C++

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Easy to find jobs

Not good for mobile development

Very similar to pseudo-code

One right way to do things

Good introduction to datatypes

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Advanced community projects

Supports various programming paradigms

Can be used in many domains

Cross-platform

Active and helpful community

Comes with extensive libraries

Good documentation

Easy to get started

Lots of tutorials

My Recommendation for C++

My Recommendation for C++

Module system is not great

Excellent compiler optimization

C++ succumbs under its own weight

Unrivalled performance amongst high-level languages

Retains nearly all bad habits of C

C code can be used in C++ code

Huge language gets in the way of learning

Teaches fundamental OOP

Huge language supports most everything

My Recommendation for C

My Recommendation for C

Portable

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Helps with learning other languages later

Low-level

Understanding of computers

It's hard to write complicated software

Favorable for the spread of viruses and DDOS attacks leveraging IoT

My Recommendation for Lua

My Recommendation for Lua

Very easy to integrate with C and C++

Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables

Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners

Batteries not included

It's embeddable

Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages

It's portable

Portable

Embeddable

Simple

Smallest footprint among all main Languages (~128KB) which makes Lua able to run in very small processors with very fast speed

It has great documentation

It's fast

There's a helpful community

My Recommendation for Java

My Recommendation for Java

Long learning curve

Akka runs here

Slow and heavy

Fantastic IDEs

Garbage collection may teach bad habits

Half-baked generics

Lacks modern features

Confusing mis-features

Locks you into the static OOP mindset

Too verbose