If you are thinking of starting to program, one of the questions that you will surely ask yourself often is what programs will I have to install on the PC? Although everything will depend on the programming language that we are going to learn, below, we are going to indicate which are the 5 essential programs that you must have installed, yes or yes, on the PC.
We are almost always going to program in text, so one of the programs that we are going to need is a text editor specially designed for programming. For example, one of the best, and essential, on any PC is none other than Visual Studio Code . This text editor for programmers is totally free and open source , and it has everything that any programmer, of any language, could need to write their code. Through plugins we can add auto-completion functions, syntax, and even AI to help us in the work of programming. It is the basic and simplest IDE, perfect for all types of programming.
If we are going to program in .NET and C++, it is possible that VSC falls short. In that case, we recommend installing Visual Studio , Microsoft‘s IDE for programming in these languages. It is much more complete software in every way, specialized both in the development and debugging of the code of these programming languages. An essential tool especially for those who work collaboratively.
If what we want is to learn to program on Android, then we must use a programming IDE specially designed for this purpose. And the best, most complete and only one that we should use is none other than Android Studio . This is Google’s official development environment with which we will be able to shape our apps using both the Java language and Kotlin. This IDE brings all the APIs and everything necessary to shape our app, it allows us to design the interface, and it even has an emulator where we can compile and run the apps to check that they work.
What if what we want is to create video games ? So the best thing is going to be to bet on an IDE for this purpose. There are many engines to create our own games, but one of the most recommended to start with, to create both 2D and 3D games, is Unity . We can use this IDE completely free of charge to give free rein to our imagination, and we can program in it both in JavaScript and in C#. In this program we have everything we need both at the interface and code level.
Finally, if we are going to create cross-platform programs, or directly need to create code that works on Linux servers, instead of setting up our own server in a virtual machine, Windows 11 has a tool that we cannot ignore: WSL, or Windows Subsystem for Linux . Thanks to this Windows subsystem for Linux we will be able to have a fully functional Linux system running on top of Windows so that we can program directly on it, compile and test that the code works correctly.
With this, we can create the programs we want, almost in the language we want. Now it will be up to us how we want to use this software, the help it offers us, or if we prefer to bet on other more professional software, and for a fee, such as JetBrains solutions.
