Five Languages To Learn as a Java Programmer

As a programmer, you want to explore new things. Learning a new language gives you a different perspective when solving problems.

What are the 5 languages that a Java developer should explore?

Java Programmer Essentials

As we go towards microservices architectures, what should a Java Programmer learn?

This is the first article in series of six articles on Java Programmer Essentials :

Learn Functional Programming and Modularity with Java 8+/Java 9+

Java is still one of the most popular programming languages around in the world today.

Java is an object oriented programming language.

Whether you want to build a web application, or an android app, or a microservices based application, Java provides you great options.

With the evolution of Android and Spring Boot, the development of mobile and web applications using Java has become a lot easier.

With Java 8, a number of functional programming features are introduced which were further enhanced in Java 9.

Modularity is introduced into Java with Java 9.

As a Java developer, we recommend you to start with focusing on getting familiar with functional programming constructs and building modular applications with Java.

Master Python

Do you know? The first version of Python was actually released two years prior to Java!

Python is by no means a new language, it’s been around since the 2 decades. Python allows you to do structured, object oriented and functional programming. Python makes it easy to write readable code.

Python contains several powerful data structures, and the Python style guidelines are very interesting indeed!

Python has several powerful features, that makes it the language of choice in fields such as Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Analytics and Big Data Analytics.

Python is definitely our pick among these programming languages.

Get Fluent In JavaScript

Even a few years back, no serious programmer would have identified JavaScript as a language to learn!

The evolution of JavaScript in the past decade has been mind-boggling. You can even build server side REST APIs with JavaScript using NodeJS.

JavaScript has evolved as the language of the browser. Earlier JavaScript frameworks were restricted to making DOM manipulation easy. Today, there are excellent client-side JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS and React providing great options to develop Single Page Applications - without directly manipulating anything in the DOM.

You can easily build large maintainable applications with JavaScript. You can write object oriented code in JavaScript programs, and organize this code efficiently into modules.

There are several large scale applications deployed that are written solely in JavaScript (both the front-end and back-end), known as full-stack applications.

If you are not familiar with Modern JavaScript, get started now!

Check Out Kotlin

Kotlin is a JVM based language.

Kotlin provides very simple programming constructs, which makes coding simple.

Kotlin is now a supported language to develop applications using Android framework, and the Spring/Spring Boot Frameworks.

If you are a Java programmer looking to learn a new language, Kotlin might be a good option.

Pick Up Scala

Scala is a functional programming language, that is also JVM based. If you want to learn to start learning pure functional style code, Scala is the way to go.

Do check out our video on the same topic:

Summary

In this video, we looked at five languages that we also recommend you to pick up, if interested in a learning a new programming language. These languages are Java Functional Programming, Python, JavaScript, Kotlin and Scala.