Ask HN: What is your favourite programming language? Why?

Important not to mistake fluency for favourite. I code mostly in python but I am attracted to lisp and Haskell.

Because they have beautiful simplicity in the first case and interesting outcomes in the second. I continue to struggle to achieve expressiveness in either. Maybe before I die.

But my real favourite is awk. Because it was the first language I used with a hash structure and so let me explore writing code which did content addressed things like count uniques over stdin string streams from logs. All kinds of languages had functions and procedures and fancy schmancy if then else but having dynamically sized data which indexed off data.. that was electrifying. Perl had them after and I suspect that in part accounted for it's popularity. Every scripting language since has too.

Probably javascript. With the caveat that all of the work I've done in javascript has been of the old school "write it in a text editor and FTP it to the server" variety, and I have little real exposure to the modern ecosystem or the problems people seem to have with javascript at scale.

I like the simplicity of the syntax. Arrays and objects are easy, closures are easy, and I like prototypal inheritance as a concept, although you're not supposed to actually use it in practice.

Lua is probably a close second, though. If I were to design a programming language, it would probably be somewhere between the two, with some C++ features tossed in for flavor (operator and function overloading, maybe generics.)

It has a good ide.

Python. Just because of the community. There are amazing developers involved in every bit of the Python community, from machine learning libraries to web frameworks :)

It's hard to find a problem that only has one Python library that solves it. Most of the time you have a dozen, and half of those are maintained better than I'd ever expect.

Don't be too hard on yourself!