Ask HN: Which programming language do you enjoy writing the most?

Definitely a Lisp language. Like Common Lisp or Racket or Clojure.

Racket, Go, & C, in order of decreasing preference. Why? Fewer surprises. I can focus on the problem rather than scratch my head over what the language is doing.

Clojure (on JVM) and Elixir (on BEAM) get a lot of love these days. Not a fan. Having to troubleshoot a mental map of two different languages for one piece of code just adds a lot of needless complexity.

Python. But I prefer working with JavaScript because it’s universal. I work for a Danish city and we participate in a lot of public sector open source organisations/networks/groups. Stuff like OS2.eu, where we actively contribute and other stuff where we use projects made by other cities

A big problem with that is tech stacks. We’re not a tech-company. We’re less than 20 ops and devs out of 7000 employees. We run 500 different IT systems and have build a few hundred ourselves. But we can’t run everything. We’re a traditional Microsoft shop like most of the European public sector, and that means our operations engineers do Microsoft servers and our developers do C#.

I mentioned OS2, they offer a huge package of nice open source tools, but they are build in a lot of different technologies. Recently a friend of mine got the job of getting some Open Source project from the city of barselona up and running and it was Ruby on Rails. No one knows Ruby on Rails around here. We might know .Net core at our place but we don’t know PHP. Our neighbouring city is the opposite and the next city does Python or maybe JAVA. Which means there is an unbelievable amount of wasted potential because we can’t share code that we can’t operate and maintain.

Which is where JavaScript comes in handy. Because of the front end landscape of 2019 everyone knows how to run a Node application. Maybe you’re not perfect at it, but it’s much easier to get it up and running securely and stable compared to a technology you’ve never touched before, and it’s not like our documentation is any more stellar than yours. So while I’m not actually a fan of JavaScript or even Node, and enjoy writing python more than other languages personally, the JavaScript ecosystem is just so damn practical.

Unicon/Icon is my language of choice, mostly because failure is an option. Icon will be found at https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/ and Unicon (Icon's descendent) at http://unicon.org/.

It has no booleans or anything that represents booleans for that matter. Something either succeeds and produces one or more results or it fails.

It has its problems (like all languages) but I find that it is easier to formulate a solution to a problem in it. I tend to use the same formulations in any other language that I might have to use.

But when you can write something like

every write(read())

to copy all lines from stdin to stdout or to test a number between a range with

if 0 it has its uses.

SNOBOL4 is the precursor to icon and it used success and failure as well. Though I haven't written any serious SNOBOL4 code since the 80's.

BUt the world is your oyster and there are many languages that you can choose from. Languages like Fortran, Simula, Squeak, any of the various LISPs, FORTH, FACTOR, there are so many and if you study and use each, you will find different ways to think about how to solve the various kinds of problems that you will come across in your career.

Happy hunting.

This is the most practical and compelling motivation for JS on the backend as I've ever read. I wonder if you could get away with using TypeScript in your ecosystem.