What programming language has made you the happiest? • Hacker News Board

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#21

Post by zbanks » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:40 AM UTC

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #16

I know that since 'the good parts' it's almost become the ironic t-shirt of the programming world, but I really love JavaScript, here's some of my reasoning: 1. By now everyone knows of JavaScript's functional features, which I must admit are awesome, but many other languages share these. But what few languages share regarding these is they're a very common part of standard js programming. A lot of new python and eve…

Javascript also has an incredibly built-in yet rich interface for GUIs that most languages don't have. You can easily use HTML to make an interface. With most other languages (exception: VB, ha), it takes significant effort to marry the frontend with the backend.

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#22

Post by zbanks » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:50 AM UTC

Haskell, but not programming in it.

Haskell really drilled in the concept of functional programming. As much as I struggle to write 'normal' code in it, the computational aspects are really fun to write.

However, after a while, I began to incorporate functional programming concepts into other languages, notably python & javascript.

Python already has functional elements built-in, such as map, reduce, filter, lambdas and list comprehensions. Its cool to replace for loops with long "one-liners"; it creates a different perspective of a list.

Javascript, on the other hand, is less blessed than python. Closures do help, however. Although JS 1.6 & beyond support Array.map, folds, and filters, it's hard to rely on them. After writing my own libraries enough times, I started using ( http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/ ) Underscore.js, if not JQuery, in every project. By its very nature, looping over DOM elements lends itself very very well to functional style programming.

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#23

Post by gaius » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 9:43 AM UTC

elviejo wrote: post #20

Logo as a kid looking at that turtle draw was freaking incredibly it is the closest I've seen to magic ever since. Now it means Smalltalk and Seaside. The one that has made the most money is PHP

Yeah - I still get a little thrill whenever I type a command and the tape library arm whirrs into moton :-)

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#24

Post by anarchitect » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 12:04 PM UTC

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #16

I know that since 'the good parts' it's almost become the ironic t-shirt of the programming world, but I really love JavaScript, here's some of my reasoning: 1. By now everyone knows of JavaScript's functional features, which I must admit are awesome, but many other languages share these. But what few languages share regarding these is they're a very common part of standard js programming. A lot of new python and eve…

2001-2009: ActionScript.

Now: JavaScript.

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#25

Post by ifesdjeen » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 1:17 PM UTC

I'd say, Scala and Ruby (primarily JRuby, i'd say). Most of time I'm working with Java libraries, and I do enjoy Java a lot, but it's not quite as powerful as Scala or Ruby. So, reusing Java libs is awesome, since there's a whole lot of them laying around.

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#26

Post by ralphc » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:56 PM UTC

Clojure. I've been a professional Java programmer for 10 years, and in that time I've dabbled in Haskell, OCaml, Python, and Common Lisp, being happiest with Common Lisp but irritated with the lack of standard modern libraries, the usual complaints. My 26 years of professional programming feels like a long journey to Clojure.

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#27

Post by masterponomo » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 6:34 PM UTC

hsmyers wrote: post #17

masterponomo wrote: post #8

IBM/370 Assembler with command-level CICS, probably because I used it early in my career on an app where every program had to be small and fast. Nothing since then has approached the sheer fun of all that bit-diddling.

Same for me, except it was a 360 :) That, coffee, an 8 foot manual rack along with a copy of Stern's book on Assembly kept me going until the wee hours...

Actually my first small, fast program used only the 360 command set because that's what my tech school had taught me. It had lots of moves of variable length data, but my "mentor" at work didn't clue me in about MVCL so I rolled my own variable moves by modifying code in flight. Yikes. Before writing the 2nd program I read more code and more books and learned the right way to do it. Both programs are still actively maintained 25 years later, and that first gets a lot of WTF responses when a new guy lays eyes on it:-)

Re: What programming language has made you the happiest?

#28

Post by pasbesoin » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 4:31 PM UTC

SpaceHobo wrote: post #10

Before I explain my answer, the reader must understand that I'm a pretty satisfied Python programmer now who wouldn't go back. But in terms of actually bringing happiness to me in one brilliant burst of energy, there's only one language in my history that achieved this: Perl. Oh sure I detest Perl, now. It provides you with too many ways to make code that fails to express the problem clearly to another programmer, an…

Another, um, "vote" for Perl. Although I haven't come to detest it.

And I agree, a lot of starting coders want to get something done. While quite a few programming courses seem to start from the other side of things, without even really explaining that they are doing so. The student sees the tasks they have in mind being months and months away and encompassing a quantity of detail that seems frighteningly overwhelming. By contrast, actually accomplishing useful things, and digging into the details as you need to, seems more motivating.

(However, it helps to concurrently receive and absorb a strong caution that you don't understand all the "magic" and should be careful of over-relying on what may turn out to be mistaken assumptions. Which reminds me, Perl seemed to imply, for me, developer testing: Don't just code it up, throw test cases -- and, if you can, live data -- against it and see what you get. Work some of the data through an alternate tool/methodology, and ensure that the results match. Continue to cross check as you move forward.)

"Programming Perl" was/is a great read. One of those books interesting not just in reciting, but in genuinely communicating with the reader.