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Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which would it be?

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Re: Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which would it be?

#21

Post by bjoli »

deepaksurti wrote: post #16

Common Lisp. Why? [0] [0]: http://p-cos.blogspot.in/2014/09/why-i-like-common-lisp.html Common Lisp / Scheme are great to learn about programming languages themselves. think learning about closures in CL vs in ObjC and you will realize how simple concepts become awkward and secondarily builds your taste so you know engineer who prides in knowing C++ complexity is a fucking idiot. Personally, CL has helped me quickly…

Scheme is what I use when I want coding to be fun (with guile being my implementation of choice).

Other languages have gotten nice repl environments in the last year, but the integration with the language is never as good as lisp repls.

Re: Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which would it be?

#23

Post by avmich »

I've thought about that for some time until it started to feel like a wrong question.

I usually wanted to code in one language to save learning many languages to an expert level. Also it felt good to have a uniform code on various levels of the system - something which today in JavaScript world is called "isomorphism". Then I realized I'm really doing different things in different layers, and in a big language I'll perhaps use different parts of the language - effectively several languages. For a small language I'll probably be creating necessary constructs first - again, different for needs of different layers - and then would use those.

Now I think it's better to have the ability to adjust language after the task, and here Lisps look rather good. Even more, with security in mind I want to use not only "language suited for the task", but "language minimally suited for the task", so it's hard to use it incorrectly and easy to reason about abilities of the particular software layer. Here, again, Lisp-like languages are a good platform. Some others languages suitable for DSL creation (Haskell? Tcl?) can also be good.

Re: Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which would it be?

#27

Post by KingMob »

mobilefriendly wrote: post #19

PHP, because it is simple, powerful, has bindings for everything, and the largest community with huge projects like Wordpress and Drupal. I know it isn't as trendy as python but all of the arguments made so far for python apply to php as well, and php is older and more widespread.

Python is actually 4 years older than PHP.

Re: Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which would it be?

#28

Post by johnny_1010 »

shakna wrote: post #13

C, because I care about speed, program size, and multiple CPU architectures. Or Stackly, a language I've been writing for nearly two years now. Like C, it's performant, compiles to tiny binaries (it maps fairly close to assembly under the hood), but unlike C it has a ref-counting GC, compile-time and runtime type safety. set [hello] fn 'displayln [Hello, World!] hello I did used to care a lot more about community ado…

https://github.com/shakna-israel/stacky

Re: Ask HN: If you could only code with one language which would it be?

#29

Post by pythonaut_16 »

mobilefriendly wrote: post #19

PHP, because it is simple, powerful, has bindings for everything, and the largest community with huge projects like Wordpress and Drupal. I know it isn't as trendy as python but all of the arguments made so far for python apply to php as well, and php is older and more widespread.

Python actually predates PHP by quite a bit.

A (non-scientific) look at Wikipedia puts Python's first public release in 1991, and PHP in 1995. But Python's roots actually go back to the late 80s, while PHP was started and released in 1995. PHP was really originally created as a collection of helper functions, not a full programming language.

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