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Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

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Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#91

Post by anarchotroll »

Macha wrote: post #52

Given the audience on HN, it's not surprising to see Python and Ruby disproportionally upvoted. (For the record: 145 for Python, 114 for Ruby at the moment, next highest is C at 53). Coffeescript is also significantly overrepresented. It's currently on 34, beating C++ (29), and in the same region as C# and Java. What I am surprised at however is that C# and Java (37 and 35) are doing as well in this poll as they are.…

C#, the language, is not windows centric. The framework released by microsoft might be, but the language itself is decoupled from windows.

Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#92

Post by kijin »

Limes102 wrote: post #46

PHP is nice... but if I could improve it, I'd like it to be not quite so loosely typed. I would like to specify the datatypes.

Every now and then, someone comes up with ideas to "improve" PHP. Some of those ideas are actually quite good. The only problem is that PHP is about as obsessed with backwards compatibility as Windows is. Good luck getting the devs to accept a feature that will break scripts written in PHP 3. (Yes, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but libraries like phpass actually do claim to work in PHP 3, 4, and 5 without modification.)

Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#93

Post by udp »

bunderbunder wrote: post #86
udp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, isn't it great that more people are backing a proprietary, closed source, Windows-centric technology? (As a pre-emptive strike, Mono does not make .NET any more "open". If Mono was maintained and supported by the same people that design the language/APIs I might change my tune.)

The programming language described by standard ECMA-334 is, like most any other ECMA standard, non-proprietary, open for anyone to use, and not particularly tied to any one platform. There is of course a particular implementation of that language which is proprietary, closed source, and tied to a particular platform. However, this is not a particularly unique feature of the language. The same is also true of ECMA-262…

The parent comment specifically mentioned more people using .NET. I don't have a problem with C# as a language.

Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#96

Post by chimeracoder »

kirinan wrote: post #23

I chose Java, but hackers shouldn't have a language that is their "favorite". They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job. I realize this may be an unrealistic task, but I try my best to do it. While I probably the best at coding Java(Quickest, and get the most done in it), I don't always use it because its not the best language for the job.

> They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job.

That's certainly a correct answer, but it's correct because it's almost tautological. 'The language that I like the most is the one that's best [for what I want to do]'. The issue is that, in this question, 'favorite' is a bit vague, and the task isn't specified. (This is why I have a problem choosing 'favorites'.)

Despite that, in this situation, I interpret it to mean 'What [general-purpose] language has the best design?' Theoretically, a perfectly-designed language would be designed in such a way that it has an absolute advantage over all other languages for every type of task.

Given that definition, it follows naturally that I would choose Lisp - it's actually not my strongest language, but even a novice Lisper can see that Lisp is both as minimal as possible and yet as powerful as possible . Since it's a shapeshifter of sorts, it can adapt itself perfectly to any setting.

The drawbacks with Lisp (in my view) have nothing to do with the design of the language itself, but rather the environment. The libraries of languages like Perl and Python are much larger, by sheer fact that the community is larger. Lisp is cross-platform, but the installation (quicklisp aside) is still messier than Ruby's gem-based packaging or Python's eggs. And lastly, because most people don't learn functional programming as their first step, it's got a learning curve.

But none of those are problems with the language itself - at least not the design of the language. (I'm assuming here that we're dealing with high-level languages - it wouldn't really make sense to compare x86 assembly to Python - if you're writing assembly, you probably have a very good reason, and Python isn't even on the table).

So in the end, your answer to this all determines on how you interpret the question, so it's fun to see what the results are... just don't try and compare them directly - I think anybody who interpreted the question the way I did would probably choose Lisp, but it's clear from the comments that many other people interpret this a different way.

(Thankfully HN is good at avoiding flamewars, but I'm sure everyone here has seen enough useless 'debate' of this same topic on other forums to understand why I mention it!)

Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#97

Post by drostie »

adambard wrote: post #78

I see a lot of votes for python, but a disproportionately small representation of python fans in the comments. If you asked me a year ago, I'dve said python. But lately, I've been using Clojure for personal projects, and it's making python seem just... boring. (I get the same feeling when I write in Ruby too) The "one right way" paradigm is a great one, and the language is solid. The built-ins are top-notch, and whil…

If you don't mind my asking, as a Python person, how did you learn Clojure?

I'm mostly programming in Python and JavaScript today, and I want to learn Clojure, but I keep seeing these very strange talks. I don't know how to articulate it, really. My best metaphor is, it feels a little like I wanted to go out and learn about Catholicism and they said, "oh, that's easy, we'll just have you sit in on a bunch of confessions and you'll figure it out in no time." People explain why they made certain language decisions and I (as yet) lack any of the background needed to know what the hell they're going on about.

Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#98

Post by hackinthebochs »

tomjen3 wrote: post #88
hackinthebochs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree with you on C#. It feels like this is what a standard, mature, widespread language should be. There are other languages that are better for specific tasks, but for the general programming language, C# really hits the sweet spot in terms of features, expressability, readability, and environment. This is the language that Java should have been--could have been. Also, I dread getting asked on my next in…

That is easy -- non nullable objects. What I mean by that is that you can already specify that some numbers may be nullable. I would love to be able to specify that some objects cannot be null and have the type-checker verify it. Even better I would have an option type so that you never need to use null, ever.

That's a good one, I'll keep that in mind. (I'm not just cribbing, I ran into a real world situation that just screamed non-nullable objects).

Re: Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

#100

Post by sofuture »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #64
simonsarris wrote: post #16

C# really feels like the most mature language that I've ever dealt with. Writing it feels clear, if something is wrong the debugger is very clear. The number of features that are there is incredible (especially post C# 2.0 when they added generics). Properties are delightful. How do you convert to a string? Convert.ToString(). How about an integer? Knowing only that one, it's what you'd expect! I also picked JavaScri…

Eh, C# is good for the environment it lives in, but it's not without it's cruft. C#'s answer for all of its missing features seems to be a generic class. Don't have tuples? We'll give you Tuple . Don't have inline functions? We'll give you Func . It feels very tacked on (especially Func).

Yeah, C# tuples are a pretty glaring hack in an otherwise great, evolving language.
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