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I am a Robotics engineer and I have just finished my MSc. I see that a lot of companies that are developing robotics solutions and automations are demanding more and more that the engineers that they are asking to hire, to be able to program. But besides Matlab which is the obvious what would be a good programming language to learn?

And by "good", I mean a language that is heavily used in industrial programming. (Industrial robots, cars and avionics, welding and painting robots and mostly automations)

Thanks in advance.

Alptigin Jalayr
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Spyros
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3 Answers3

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In my experience, C and C++ are widely used in research and industry. They're fast, and there are good libraries available for everything from Computer Vision to Linear Algebra.

Alptigin Jalayr
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Plain ol' C is used quite a bit in embedded systems (it's what I used when I worked with a Z-80 based industrial controller back in the late 90s). C++ and Java (shocking, I know) as well. Ada is used in a few niche areas (avionics, space systems). If you're not familiar with any programming languages, C might be a good place to start and would make learning some of the others (like C++ and Java) a bit easier.

James Adam
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Industrial robotics is low level, you're looking at C. Although it's quite a plunge. Maybe think about stopping off at Python first.

Awalias
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  • First of all thanks everybody for the answers. James I heard exactly the same thing about Java but I was surprised too. A friend (iOS Developer) told me that it is more for web services and not so much about robotics, but I keep constantly hearing abut how powerful it is. About Python I agree, because in fact it was one of our courses during the MSc. But my main doubt was about what to choose between C, C++, or something else. – Spyros Feb 22 '13 at 23:47
  • I personally prefer C, C++ is great for where object-orientation is necessary, but it seems overkill for many applications, and many of the popular libraries can be unreliable (i.e. boost). C is lean and gives you full control. That being said, they do go hand in hand... why not learn both! – Awalias Feb 26 '13 at 10:57
  • @Spyros also considoring that you already used Python; python and C can work really well together (using ctypes or swig) – Awalias Feb 26 '13 at 10:59