41–50 of 60 posts
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.
select this from that where something is true
That’s the core of everything you do.
I could write all day about what a mess it can become, and how awful debugging is. But I still enjoy it
It hits a real sweet spot for Enterprise coding, domain modeling, scientific computing, and cloud computing. It's the only way I'll touch legacy MS-ecosystem projects. The community is driven by open source and highly cross platform. It's also got type-checked scripting that makes 'plumbing languages' and utility scripts look second rate, for pragmatic day to day stuff, while maintaining complete access to the libraries and models of any of your systems.
Potent stuff for people whose technical decisions are regulated (or even just subject to Enterprise Thinking by Important People).
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 whi…
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.
Let me earn myself a -4. I do my hobby code in VB .NET. VB6 was the first thing I learned, and whether I'm doing C++, C#, or PHP, whatever else I've ever used, I'm usually translating in my head what I want to do... from VB. So I've ended up back at VB after several years in other languages because it cuts out the cognitive load.
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…
I second this. I love ES5. It was a beautiful, simple language. And it runs just the same on literally every device. The JavaScript community has taken a horrible turn towards complexity. I’ve been planning a fork of the npm tree, to return to ES5. But it’s a big project and I want to be ready with a good modern, modular web toolkit before I do. (The plan is not just to fork an ES5-compatible tree, but to allow peopl…
the only thing wich is lacking right now is native support for it in the browsers
I started to look into Elm and might fall in love with it soon enough, if so I'll try my best to make my coworker love it too :)
Tldr: OCaml in my dreams, Typescript in reality, probably soon to be replaced by Elm
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this. I love ES5. It was a beautiful, simple language. And it runs just the same on literally every device. The JavaScript community has taken a horrible turn towards complexity. I’ve been planning a fork of the npm tree, to return to ES5. But it’s a big project and I want to be ready with a good modern, modular web toolkit before I do. (The plan is not just to fork an ES5-compatible tree, but to allow peopl…
i understand your love for javascript... but i dont understand the hate for es6 & upwards. ive rewritten all my code to atleast es2015 and lost so much overhead while doing it wich makes my projects alot easier to maintain. (and alot more predictable) the only thing wich is lacking right now is native support for it in the browsers
ES6 introduces way more syntax, making it much harder for beginners to learn.
Arrow functions make scope much harder to reason about, which makes closures more of an anti-pattern. In ES6 closures are one of a tiny number of scope patterns so you can actually use them.
Arrow functions cause bind to break in unpredictable ways.
Most other ES6 features are just syntactic sugar which offer no software engineering benefit and add a whole layer of conflicting code styles that one must constantly switch between, or else deal with constant pointless linting fixes if you are adhering to a consistent standard.
ES6 demands you use a transpiler which makes debugging flakier, and adds another place for bugs and maintenance work, in addition to often slowing he build down.
If I wanted deal with that much headache I’d just use typescript and at least get type checking in exchange for the syntax change and transpile step.
ES6 exists because some programmers never understood prototype and bind. And felt naming a function that is only called once was icky. Mostly former Ruby programmers. So they bolted a shitty Ruby onto JavaScript in order to get people to stop using prototype and bind, which are the heart of JavaScript’s control flow.
Basically the chest burster from Alien.