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

Sorta hijacking the question here, but I'm curious if anyone here prefers using some concatenative language. If so, what language (s) and why?

I recently stumbled across http://concatenative.org and my curiosity is thoroughly piqued.

Clojure. Give me immutability or give me death :D

Either Common Lisp or Scheme are effective introductions to lisp. Both languages are standardized. But Common Lisp has a large standard library (pros and cons depending on your tastes and interest in the language).

Scheme has the benefit of some particularly excellent introductory texts (Little Schemer, Seasoned Schemer, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, How to Design Programs). The first two are not free, but are great introductory texts (and can be used with Common Lisp with some adaptation, same with the other two), the second two are freely available online.

Scheme is also a conceptually "purer" functional language than Common Lisp. Depending on your background and feelings towards other functional programming languages that may have some appeal to you.

Common Lisp has a comprehensive standard library via the components described in The Common Lisp HyperSpec. With Quicklisp and other things you can easily add packages to your projects extending your environment to provide support for nearly anything anyone has ever written a CL library for.

From a technical perspective, Common Lisp can be a more pragmatic language in many ways. It allows you to drop into base procedural code, or write functional code. It has a built-in object oriented system (CLOS) that has a lot of fantastic features. Much of this can be added to Scheme, and may be available through an SRFI, but is not baked-in. If you're interested in implementing object systems, Scheme can be a fun language to use for that purpose.

Setting aside those, another big difference is one that sometimes causes heated debate, but for me is just a thing to keep in mind. Scheme is a lisp-1, Common Lisp is a lisp-2 (really a lisp-n). Scheme has one namespace that everything uses (though you can encapsulate things inside of closures and such). What this means is that at the top level your functions and variables share a namespace. If you make a function f and a variable f only one of them exists. This leads to some cleaner expressions when using a functional style as you can just use the variable name in the function position. In Common Lisp you may have to use something like (apply #'f some-param) when f is a variable holding a function reference. This is a minor thing, in my view, but if your intent is to explore the functional side of lisps it can be nicer to use Scheme. Common Lisp has separate namespaces for functions, variables, macros, and other entities (I'd say objects but I want to avoid confusion with the sense of object-oriented programming objects).

Both have module or package systems for organizing projects. Both have good testing capabilities baked in or that are easy to add on. Both have active communities (with a decent amount of overlap between them).

Java is at least a close second. Very generally speaking, I've found that Java has a slightly better ecosystem when it comes to more 'enterprise' solution, while python is slightly better on the science and engineering front. Also, python is the standard scripting language in just about every application I run into so, if for no other reason, I wouldn't want to give on a python just because of that.

Is the Native target stable, or experimental as of now?