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

There is this oddness between how programming in Haskell feels and programming in Python. Each time I go back to Haskell to try and learn a bit more about that environment, I find the mindset carrying over to what I write in Python.

Haskell. I like the power of using a powerful type system to get more guarantees when you compile your program. It's like getting additional unit tests with 100% code coverage for free.

Python. I'm an "infrequent" programmer, and I find the syntax sticks with me between projects, which is a huge time-saver. It's also the cleanest, most readable language I've ever programmed in, though I realize that's an extremely personal preference. Like brownbat, I have a bias for keywords over symbols. I'm also a huge fan of "explicit over implicit" and "there should be one right way to do it," which is why I favor Python over Ruby. The biggest win, though, as I've gotten more experienced with the language, is the ease and simplicity of "pythonic" programming--using iterators, generators and list comprehensions, favoring built-in data types (dictionaries, tuples and sets) over custom classes, and so on. My Python programs tend to be much, much shorter than what I'd write in C++ or C#, easier to read and quicker to write. Win, win, win for my purposes as I mostly don't care about speed ...

Julia lover here. I love having math at my fingertips and the ease of writing x’x\x’y. I like writing numerical code, knowing I can change types later and it will likely work. Still, I miss tab-tab from ipython for method completion from time to time and I work all day in mostly C++.

swift, because it has a high level syntax with a really nice Generics implementation, but can still interface relatively easily with low level API's. Also because it uses reference counting for memory management instead of mark and sweep garbage collection so has more predictable performance and low memory overhead.