Best 4 Coding Languages to Learn Right Now to Start in Web3
Here’s the Quick Summary if TL;DR:
🌟 Web3 is an awesome space — being a builder here is a good idea!
It’s changing huge things, and there’s a lot of money. The 4 languages:
1. 🧱 Solidity
2. 📜 TypeScript
3. 🦾 Rust
4. 👾 GraphQL
I’m not an authority on blockchain or Web3 though, this is just what I learnt through interaction with others in the space, and what I’m learning myself. Be sure to do your own research too! Hope this helps as a start though!Connect with me:
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Web3 is an awesome space to be in — there is huge money being poured into the space right now (we’re talking Billions with a big B); there’s good reason for that too.
Web3 has the potential to seriously evolve the way things are done on the internet and by extension revolutionise the way we organise ourselves as a society. As a result, I think it’s great to be able to be a builder in that space, a pioneer in the future of the internet. This article seeks to help highlight some of the technologies that are currently most popular in the space, and are in high demand — despite this though, they’re not massively mainstream, and so you have a decent edge if you’re familiar with these while others are still catching up.
This list was actually inspired by an individual (who professionally works in the space) I met at the NFTxNYC conference that took place early November 2021, where I was exposed to just how big the ecosystem really is. Having spoken to various technical individuals, these 4 languages are the ones that most cropped up, and as such, I believe to be the best languages to get into the Web3 space right now.
🧱 Solidity
Solidity is the language that is used to write smart contracts on most blockchains, most notably Ethereum, and as such is one of the most crucial languages to work on Web3 projects.
Particularly if you already have existing programming experience it’s generally pretty easy to get started with another language, and this is the perfect language to get your Web3 career launched. One of the best resources to learn it is a website called CryptoZombies which has been recommended to me to learn Solidity repeatedly by people in the industry, and from my experience on it, is genuinely one of the best resources I’ve found.
📜 TypeScript
TypeScript (TS) is becoming increasingly popular as an evolution of Javascript (JS), both in and out of the Web3 ecosystem. TS is a superset of JS, so if you’re wondering whether to learn JS or TS — you can’t learn TS without learning JS. That said, if you already know JS, TS is super easy to overlay on top of that and you’ll be able to fit right into existing TS projects!
TS can be used (just as JS) in a number of contexts on the web, both Web2 and Web3 alike, from developing frontends in frameworks like React, Angular or Vue (which I would recommend learning at least one to do some frontend dev) or working in the backend with Node.js & Express. In my opinion, it’s one of the best languages to learn in tech in general, and for Web3 too!
🦾 Rust
Imagine taking Python/C++, making it younger, faster, more secure and you end up with Rust!
It’s a high-level programming general-purpose language, in many ways like Python, but around 12x faster, matching C/C++ speeds and with guaranteed memory safety. Definitely worth doing your own research on, but Rust is a newer language that seems to be picking up momentum as a general purpose language with a growing community around it. In my eyes, it’s an evolution of Python/C++ which will continue to grow in popularity over the coming years.
In fairness though, by no means can I predict the future, and so it’s always worth looking into things yourself to make up your own opinion on whether it’s worth learning or not.
👾 GraphQL
GraphQL is a query language, not so much a general purpose language or for writing smart contracts, but is instead involved in making queries within those smart contracts; it’s a genuinely really intuitive way of writing queries. As Web3 grows, and things grow more interconnected, there is a growing need to be able to efficiently retrieve and send data between different platforms — GraphQL is up next for that. Check out this page on Ethereum.org on why Web3 queries are better made in GraphQL.
Take Bitquery, who have made a GraphQL API where you can query more than 30 blockchains through a unified interface with GraphQL; it’s practical, cleaner & very intuitive. I don’t think it takes too long to learn how to make queries themselves, and is definitely worth exploring if you’re looking into emerging tech!
Closing Note
Do note, however, that I am by no means an authority on this subject. I’m currently a full-stack Web2 developer, and am in fact moving into the Web3 space myself. The above list was compiled having had various conversations with individuals working in the Web3 space, and is the list I myself am using to learn and start working in Web3 (and I’m learning them in the order listed above.)
I would recommend consulting other sources too as for what to learn and looking into the languages themselves to get a little more context as this article is far from comprehensive on the features of the individual languages themselves. Make sure not to spend too long analysing the languages though, a mistake I’ve done in the past, as it’s better to start learning something than nothing.
Hope it helped!
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