A Deeper Understanding of Compiled and Interpreted Languages
     This week, I learned the difference between compiled languages and interpreted languages. Before this course, I’m never aware that there is such a big difference between these two types of programming languages. It gives me a deeper understanding of JAVA which I use every day at work. Although I’ve known that Java is portable across platforms, I never know it’s somehow an exception in the compiled languages. Compiled languages are usually platform-specific, while Java manages to leverage its JVM to keep its portability (McKenzie C., n.d.). In my experience, the interpreted languages I’ve used is Javascript. It is very convenient to use Javascript; all I have to do is to add a script tag inside an HTML file. Since the interpreter of Javascript is already embedded in browsers. I don’t even have to install any interpreter on my local laptop. However, I’ve been working as a backend programmer, I don’t have a deeper view into Javascript as well as interpreted languages. Therefore, I would love to take this course as a great chance to understand more about Python and interpreted languages.
     I also learned how to set up Python environment and started to write my first Python program. There are many things I need to learn in order to be familiar with Python. Every time when I started to learn a new programming language like Java and C, it takes me lots of time on setting up the environment. Therefore, I set up my first goal to understand the eco-system of Python. For now, I know many Python programmers use Anaconda as their IDE. However, it’s not really the same as the IDEs for Java. To me, it’s more light-way compared with Eclipse which is one of the IDEs for Java. And it’s quite handy that the package manager in Python is already included in the Anaconda. On the contrary, in Java, we have to choose what package managers we want to use by ourselves such as Maven. In this practice to set up Python, it’s relatively simpler to me; when I learned to set up Java, it takes more tasks to just let me write the “Hello World” code. In addition, the syntax of Python is much less complex. For the first “Hello World” in Java, I wrote more than 6 lines with dozens of tokens. In Python, there is only one line and everything is starting to work. That’s also the moment I came to agree that it’s a better choice to use interpreted languages when you just want to develop something quickly.
     In the Discussion forum, I posted a comment to compare Python with Java. One of my classmates, Miguel, gave me an avant-garde question. He asked whether someday A.I. would be smart enough to generate codes; as result, no programmer is needed in the world anymore (Fernandes N., 2018). I pondered over this issue because of his feedback. In my opinion, if that happens, it would be beneficial to us, since A.I. could replace those repetitive work for us. In programs, there are many repetitive patterns and contents that programmers have to deal with every day. A.I. can save us from spending time on those trivial things and free us to do something in a higher level.
References
McKenzie C. (n.d.). JAVA. Retrieved from https://www.theserverside.com/definition/Java
Fernandes N. (2018). Re: Unit 1 Discussion [Online discussion post]. Retrieved from https://my.uopeople.edu/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=161593#p2898617
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