Blockchain is one of the fastest growing technologies in software development. Blockchain is all about software and how to store data.
To become a software developer, you need to be a programmer but the good news is, Blockchain technology is a platform and language agnostic technology. You can use pretty much any major programming language to write blockchains. Two major components of blockchain are distributed database and hashing, that you can use any major language that support these two functionalities.
To write blockchain from scratch, you will need understanding of cryptography, distributed ledger technology, and low-level coding. You will also need some coding experience with one of the following or a similar programming language.
- Java
- C++
- JavaScript
- Go
- Python
- C#
- Ruby
- Solidity
- PHP
Cryptographically is data is cryptographically secure using a hash mechanism. The data is immutable and incorruptible.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) also known as a distributed ledger or a shared ledger a way to stored data on a peer-to-peer distributed network. The data is updated and synchronized using a consensus algorithm as a part of the technology. Blockchain technology is somewhat based on the distributed ledger technology.
You also need experience with low-level coding to interact with data and network. Blockchain is based on a P2P network that means you need to know some level of network programming including dealing with network protocols and communication between computers using ports. You can also mix multiple languages, depending on what part of blockchain you work on. C++ provides better support of network programming so you may end up using C++ for that purpose.
You don’t always need to write your own blockchain from scratch. You can also use an existing open source project. There are many public open source blockchains that you can fork and make it your own blockchain.
Each blockchain project has its own specific use case. For example, Bitcoin is used for cryptocurrency purpose, while Ethereum is designed to write smart contracts. Here are some of the projects and their purpose.
- Bitcoin – Written in C++.
- Ethereum – Written in C++ and solidity that was designed to write ethereum smart contracts.
- Ripple – Written in python.
- Steller – Steller core was written in C++ but also includes JavaScript and C++ for other components.
- IOTA – Written in Java and JavaScript.
- Verge – Written in PHP and JavaScript.
- Stratis – Originally written in C++ but slowly moved to C# and .NET Core.
- Bitcoin Cash – C++ and Ruby.
- NEM – Java, JavaScript, Swift
