DEV Community: Vrezh Oganisyan

How to choose a programming language?

Vrezh Oganisyan — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 20:31:21 +0000

The post is originally published on my blog.

Recently I had a webinar (in Armenian) where I was talking about programming languages and stacks, their differences, and how to choose one.

In the article we're going to speak about five major software application types and ecosystems (languages, frameworks, libraries they have):

Part 1. Software Application Types
- Web Applications
- Mobile Applications
- Desktop Applications
- Machine Learning
Part 2. Algorithm for choosing a language
- Tips
- Experience
Part 3. Materials

Note I've created also a Mind Map for the information I'm going to tell below. Make sure to follow mind map using
the link or images that I've attached to each chapter.

Web Applications

When speaking of web apps one should imagine sites that he is using every day. They usually consist of two parts: frontend and backend.

Frontend — is the practice of converting data to a graphical interface, through the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so that users can view and interact with that data. (Wikipedia)

HTML stands for hypertext markup language — the backbone of every page that lives on the web.

Hypertext is the text which contains links to other texts. (Ted Nelson, 1965)

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and its main purpose is to make sites look gorgeous.

And JS stands for the most popular language that millions of people use daily.

The front end is an interface between the user and the backend. The backend has three parts to it: server, application, and database. To handle the backend of given applications, programmers or backend developers have to deal with backend technologies that include languages like Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and many others.

One of the groups of backend languages includes those that have a strict type system and tight coupling with OOP ideas. These languages are Java, C#, C++, and many others. They are very popular among big enterprise companies due to their strictness and safety. Usually, newbies find them hard as a first language because of the high entry threshold.

Another group of languages includes those that have a dynamic type system, mostly they are multiparadigm with a low entry threshold. They are easier for learners because you can jump into the language very fast and see the result. JS (Node.js), Python, Ruby, PHP are the most famous languages. Big tech companies, like Twitter, Github, Basecamp are using Ruby (and Ruby on Rails framework) for backend development. Facebook and VK have been created using PHP (at least first versions).

Pros of web apps:

One development team for all Operating Systems (user only needs browser)
Development speed due to the infrastructure of libraries and frameworks which allow solving almost all problems.
Low entry threshold

Cons of web apps:

They lose to native apps because of the lack of access to hosting platforms (for example, Notifications, GPS, Cameras). Although I hope that Web 2.0 and PWA's will change the situation and WEB will be great again.
There's no way to create high GPU-consuming apps (like big games) in WEB.

Mobile Applications

Researches by Statista are showing that in the third quarter of 2020 the half of the traffic worldwide came from mobile devices. I'm almost sure that half of the readers are also using mobiles so there is no need to describe what mobile applications are.

What is not clear when we're speaking about mobiles is their types and what languages one should master to start coding. To clarify that, let's explore three approaches to mobile development.

1. Hybrid applications

A hybrid app is essentially a combination of a native app and a web app. Although this type of app can be installed on a device like a native app, it technically is a web app. These types of apps are built with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and run in a web view.

So technically you still are writing your HTML, CSS, and JS
code like you was doing in the case of web apps but now you're running the code in a web view.

One might think that this is brilliant technology and we should use it as a standard because now we can share the code between web and mobile, but things are not that easy. Hybrid apps are not showing good performance: apps are freezing and their UX suffers a lot (you can sense that even physically that the app is written for the web, not the mobile world).

2. Native Applications

When speaking about native apps, we should mention that there are two major operating systems for mobile: iOS and Android and both of them have their languages with big ecosystems.

For many years in the iOS world, the main language was Objective-C but then apple presented Swift which is easier for developers and now it's a de-facto standard for iOS applications.

In the case of Android, there's the same scenario, Java was the main language but then JetBrains presented Kotlin which took part in the market.

Native Apps had better UX due to their connection with host OS and direct access to the Notification, Camera, and other APIs.

At the same time, companies need two development teams to handle both Operating systems because it's not frequent when one developer knows both languages. It's the main disadvantage of native applications.

3. React Native

React Native combines the best parts of these worlds: it allows to write code that runs on both Operating Systems (actually 70-80% of the code), it allows companies to use frontend developers and their knowledge of JS and React and during the parts where React (and js) are close to their limits (GPU-consuming operations), you can write code on Swift or Kotlin and connect it with React Native via the so-called bridge (see RN docs for more info, it's really interesting. I promise).

Desktop Applications

The desktop world is similar to mobile. As the main advantage, we can see better UX because of the access to the Host Environment.

And as in mobile, here in Desktop, there are two popular approaches to development.

Native Applications
Here we can use a lot of languages, like C# (created by Microsoft and works great on Windows), C++, Java, etc. The only problem is that in some cases we need multiple languages for different Operating Systems.
Electron Applications
JS Ecosystem has reached even this point and using HTML, CSS, and JS we can build cross-platform desktop apps. VS Code, Facebook Messenger, Figma, WhatsApp have been created with Electron. Also, it worth mentioning that Electron applications are cross-platform which means the code can be run in different OS environments.

Machine Learning

There are many languages that one can use for creating ml products: Python, R, JS, C, C++, Java, C# but the big part of the market are developing the products using Python because of its big infrastructure: tons of libraries and platforms like Tensorflow are available for Python (also for JS). That's why Python is the number one choice for ML.

Tips

Finally, we know about most software application types and now we can create an algorithm for picking a language and our algorithm will base on three criteria.

Skills and interests

If you are interested in visual information representation and working with the product that end-users are gonna face, then maybe frontend, mobile or desktop stacks are for you. Elsewhere, if you're not interested in visual and more in data processing and manipulation then you should consider Back End or ML stack is right for you.

Mentors and Environments

Mentors and people who surround you are also very important. So if most of your colleagues and friends know any programming language, then you should consider that one because their role in your first steps will be crucial.

Languages by market

The one thing that newbies should also take into consideration is the market. If there's no need for developers for the language that you consider then maybe it's not the best option. That's why it's really important to check what the market needs. I'd recommend to stard with Stack Overflow survey to understand market needs better.

Experience

I chose JS and React Ecosystem because of their cross-environmental approach. JS and React are being used in Web, Mobile, Desktop, and even ML which allows me to focus not on technologies but on creating applications. I also understand that JS Ecosystem is not the best performance-wise and sometimes reaches its limits but in most cases, it gives me tons of other benefits.

I hope that I helped to create a framework that will help you to find your language and most importantly, your ecosystem.

Materials

Alice in IT

Vrezh Oganisyan — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 15:10:13 +0000

Note, the article originally published on my blog: https://oganisyan.com/blog/alice-in-it/

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that”. (Lewis Carroll)

In 1865 Lewis Carroll wrote that we need to run twice as fast as we can just to go anywhere in Wonderland. More than 150 years of intensive scientific and technological progress turn the IT industry into the new Wonderland. As a result instead of the paradise on Earth, we got burnouts, crashed work-life balances, and infinite threads of holy wars regarding new programming frameworks and languages. I think that we got into the trap of Wonderland where consuming matters more than creating.

In the article, I want to discuss the main problems of the so-called Wonderland and will try to propose a solution and a new way of existence in the IT world. So, wear masks, and let's dive deep into this land!

Burnout

As I have mentioned earlier, in the new circumstances the only way to progress is to adopt "study harder, work longer, and never give up" paradigm. Surely, this paradigm might make you feel happy and fulfilled in the short-term cause you will start to see how quickly your skills are improving by mastering different technologies, but in the long-term, you won't be able to follow "running faster" approach because of the rhythm. Your health won't be able to continue this kind of life and you will start to feel depression and burnout.

To dig deeper into different approaches to being motivated, productive, and healthy, I will recommend starting understanding the ways your organism (especially brain) works. I'd recommend to from my article about learning and management and then give some time to "Learning how to Learn" course on Coursera.

The lack of work-life balance

Nowadays it's quite popular to forget about life by placing work at the center of life. Similarly to burnout, in the short term, you will get a better job and portfolio, increased salary, while in the long-term you can get ruined life and relationships.

The one thing some might understand is that the quality of the ability to work mostly depends on your life. To avoid being trapped in the 'hard work pays off' paradigm try to alternate the periods when you are working hard and getting rest by planning it before important projects and deadlines. Make sure that after some time of exhausting projects you can get enough rest.

Holy wars about "yet another framework"

The topic that drives me crazy is infinite wars about the next important technology which is going to change the way we ~~live~~ write code. The stories of successful companies show us that stack doesn't matter, that different languages, frameworks, and paradigms can create projects that customers love.

By holy warring about the next great framework, we're moving important things like customer satisfaction, performance (still regretting that I used gatsby for blog) and security to the background of our attention.

So next time, when you start to discuss the next revolutionary thing, try to answer can it bring valuable improvements ~~to your cv~~ for customers.

Think Different

In my opinion, the only way to break the chains of burnout is to start doing stuff differently because as we can see previous paradigms of life showed us their unsustainability.

By differently I mean to stop putting ourselves in the position of a squirrel trapped in a wheel where we are working hard to have abilities and skills to work more without any goals.

By differently I mean to follow examples of the people who built the Wonderland for us and their principles were: inventing, exploring, and building stuff.

By differently I mean to get out of the wheel and start to explore and build stuff that might encourage our interest.

The video below may help to understand the idea better:

Additional Materials

The Rule of 20 Links

Vrezh Oganisyan — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 23:25:20 +0000

Note, the article originally published on my blog: https://oganisyan.com/blog/the-rule-of-20-links/

At the time when I was a CS student, I had a problem with understanding the topics from the first attempt during the lesson. So almost always I needed to work hard after the class to be okay with the material. I spend a lot of nights trying to cope with the topics by reading different articles (in parallel I was blaming myself for not being so smart 🤟).

All these difficulties make me realize that I need to explore how the system called the brain learns and interprets materials. After some sleepless nights I get acquired with the ideas of spaced repetition, chunking, and the illusion of competence that I covered in the previous article¹.

This researches brought me to the idea that we should understand the way that our brain works instead of blaming ourselves. Some might argue that there're a lot of people who're learning faster and smoother than another, but for this time let's not dig that deeper and just accept that if you're not that kind of a person, you should continue to read instead of self-blaming and seeking the ways to become next genius.

The understanding of the basics of neuroscience gives me patterns on how to work so at the time I started teaching programming and I was able to notice that most of my students facing the same issues as me. So I decided to come up with applicable idea/analog that might help them to understand and start learning instead of self-devouring. Yet another sleepless nights presented me "the rule of 20 links".

"The Rule of 20 Link" says that understanding of the topic taking a study of around 15-20 links and resources.

The only thing that I ask is just to try to find and work with those 20 links after the session of self-devouring. Below you can find my table based vision of working with those links.

Note, the number of links you need to achieve the same level may vary depends on your previous skills but on average it takes 20 links/resources.

Stages of mastering	Knowledge
Link 0 - 1	Getting familiar with the topic: (in the best case understanding the main concepts)
Link 1 - 6	Solving template problems tasks
Link 6 - 10	Solving applicable tasks and basic vision of big picture
Link 10 - 15	Acquiring with the underlying ideas and why's. Understanding the theoretical. and practical use of the topic
Link 15 - 20	Ability to have a conversation about the topic or even to explain it to the complete beginners

My point with the rule is to prevent you from giving up until you really tried to work with the content the way that your brain expects you to work.

Additional Literature 📖

Thanks for your time and attention. Follow my blog to stay up to date: https://oganisyan.com/

Management and Learning tips

Vrezh Oganisyan — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 07:38:45 +0000

Note, the article originally published on my blog: https://oganisyan.com/blog/self-management-tips/

Part 1. How to cope with procrastination
Part 2. Chunking
- 2.1. Illusion of competence
- 2.2 Seeing the bigger picture
Part 3. Explore memory: long and short term
Part 4. The importance of rest and mindfulness

Part 1. How to cope with procrastination

Procrastination is the process when your brain tries to change the focus from the tasks that increase your anxiety. You should know that a lot of tasks at first make you feel bad and that’s okay, you should be okay with that and keep in mind that this sneaky feeling will go away as soon as you will make your first steps. To fight those feelings try to use tips below:

Divide and Conquer
- Divide big tasks into small chunks (in the best case a lot of 30 minutes achievable tasks
Pomodoro technique
- The technique is based on dividing your work into 25-30 minutes intervals when you’re concentrating on one thing
- That’s why in the previous section I recommend dividing big tasks into small chunks. In the best-case scenario, you can use each timer for a sub-task that you’ve created in the previous step.
Reward
- Use rewards after each complete Pomodoro. It’ll make you more comfortable with achieving tasks.
- Keep a planner journal The journal will help you to track your progress. Note that writing down your work completion time is very important. It’ll help you to avoid overworking and burnout
- Try not to fill your journal with a lot of tasks (4-7 is best) cause it may increase your anxiety level
- Try to start each day with a hard task. Even if you procrastinate the remained task, at the end of the day it’ll make you feel better that at least you’ve done something

Part 2. Chunking

Chunking is the process of uniting bits of information through meaning. You can’t remember tons of information without understanding and creating a big picture that’s why you need to understand how to form chunks. Use tips below to improve your ability to create and maintain chunks.

Importance of context
- You should understand the context in which the content you’re trying to “chunk” is going to be used. Use the top-down process (mentioned below) to make sure you buy into context.
Spaced repetition
- You need to repeat the information that you need to “chunk” regularly to keep neural connections tight (see Chapter 3 for more information)
The bottom-up process
- Is the process when repetition and practice can help you build strong chunks
The top-down process
- Is the process of seeing the bigger picture to better understand the context in which the “chunk” is going to be used. For example, you can look through the whole book, explore chapters and images to better understand.

2.1. Illusion of competence

Sometimes when you’ve just read the material or watch the lesson and the material is in your working memory (see Chapter 3), you might be in a state called “illusion of competence”. It’s the state of mind when one might think that he mastered the topic. At the same time, you should understand that knowing and doing are different things. To avoid such a bias, use tips below:

Try to use the knowledge you’ve just learned by doing
Recall
- The process when you’re trying to regenerate the material that you’ve consumed right before. (For example, try to close the book and recall everything you’ve just learned)
- Retelling information and content to yourself or someone else might help you to be fluent in the topic and understand what parts you miss.
- Mini-tests might help you to understand (Coursera’s tests after chapters do help to understand the material better and get back if you missed something)
- Avoid highlighting a lot of content
- Highlighting might give you the wrong assumption that you’ve worked with the material and mastered it. Try not to take a fancy to highlight (one for a chapter is enough), instead use recall techniques

2.2 Seeing the bigger picture

As I’ve mentioned in the ‘Top-down’ process, seeing a bigger picture of the material might help you to form a better understanding and create strong “chunks”. At the same time, you should be aware that there’s some biases that might disturb you.

The first bias that might disturb your learning process is the Einstellung effect. It describes the bias when the first idea on “how to solve a problem” might block other ones (even if they’re better than the first one).

Another bias is Overlearning. It refers to a state when some is practicing newly acquired skills more than it needs. It might lead to a state when you are focusing just on one point of view related to the topic.

If you want to really master the topic and avoid biases mentioned above, Interleaving technique might help you. It’s the process of jumping back and forth between different problems and situations. It gives your brain time to analyze the issue and come up with a better solution. A good sleep or walk might also help you to overcome overlearning and Einstellung effects.

Part 3. Explore memory: long and short term

Let’s review long and short term memories and understand the differences between them. First, we need to understand that memory is the faculty of the brain responsible for storing and retrieving information. They’re highlighting two kinds of memory: long and short term memories. The difference between them is in the capacity and duration. Some studies show that in the short term memory we might store from 4 to 7 chunks of information and they have time limits and if we aren’t careful of repeating and practicing them, they are going away. Meanwhile, the long term memory capacity theoretically is infinite.

If you’re interested in improving your memory and ability to memorize information, consider using following tips:

Spaced Repetitions
- Is the technique of repeating information or practicing the skill regularly with some skipped intervals
Memory palace technique
- The technique is based on the knowledge that (evolutionarily) we’re remembering places extremely good. So we can use this knowledge and connect the information we want to memorize in the context of places we know

Part 4. The importance of rest and mindfulness

Sometimes the only thing we’re concerned about is productivity and self-improvement. And if one continues thinking only about work or learning, it might lead to the point when some will have no fuel left to continue being productive or even worse it might lead to burnout. If you want to prevent yourself from being in a state when you can no longer work without the help of other people, you might consider the following tips.

Work-life balance
- One should know that setting boundaries between work/study and life can really help you to achieve harmony and have a healthy state of mind. Try to set borders between working and resting hours. Elsewhere you might be in a situation when you have troubles in both areas.
Leisure time
- Try to set a time when you’re done with the work and dedicate remaining hours on leisure. Sometimes you can even have a list of things you want to do (e.g. watching tv shows, reading fiction, etc.)
Physical activity
- Studies show that some intervals of physical activity might improve your learning skills and help you to better solve problems.
- At the same time, such physical activities as running, walking, and even lifting heavy weights will improve your health and give you more energy to face daily routines and problems
Mindfulness practices
- Studies show that mindfulness practices are tightly coupled with switching on your brain’s default mode network which helps your brain to better process information that you consumed during the day.
- Consider meditation, repeating mantras or even physical activities mentioned above as a way to practice mindfulness
Sleep
- I guess I shouldn’t write that sleep is the most important part of rest and processing information, so I’m not going to tell you tales about profits of getting good sleep, I just want to ask you to get enough.

Thanks for your time and attention. Follow my blog to stay up to date: https://oganisyan.com/

Inspired by the Coursera course "Learning How to Learn" by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski and Dr. Barbara Oakley. Note, I’m not a scientist and all information below based on the researches mentioned in the course.