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Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

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

#161

Post by ylem »

Aloisius wrote: post #107

I was not expecting Python to be getting near as many votes as Ruby. It is my favorite language simply because the pseudocode I write on whiteboards is basically Python. Strangely, it has been since well before I really started using it regularly.

I find that I'm rather productive in python for scientific computing and go towards C (or occasionally even fortran) when I need something faster. I also find that it has a rather shallow learning curve for students who come in knowing java...

But generally, I think it's good to pick the right language for the right domain. I keep trying to find an excuse to learn Erlang ;>

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

#162

Post by dpark »

udp wrote: post #155
dpark wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If Microsoft controlled both major implementations of C# and .Net, you'd consider that more open? Maybe you should think about that a little bit more.

Mono is open source. If it were the official (reference) implementation, of course I'd consider .NET more of an open platform.

That doesn't sound more open to me. Is Java more open than C++? Java's official implementation is open source, but it's controlled by Oracle. C++ doesn't even (to my knowledge) have an official implementation, yet it has numerous practical implementations, some of which are open source.

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

#163

Post by reitzensteinm »

astrofinch wrote: post #108
reitzensteinm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm not especially fond of the Haxe language, but it's Good Enough that I'm happy using it day to day. However, its ability to export to so many different targets (C++, Javascript [+ Node.js], Java in beta I believe, Flash SWF, AS3, Tamarin, PHP etc) is a real killer feature. Would that count towards this poll or not?

Which targets are you using? Wouldn't be awkward to use Haxe for a project that employed language specific APIs? It seems like the sweet spot would be using it to write basic libraries that had no external dependencies.

C++, Flash, and Tamarin and Neko experimentally.

Platform specific APIs are awkward, which is why it's mainly used for writing games. NekoNME abstracts most of that away. I'm not so sure how easily it does node.js.

But the standard runtime for Haxe has been ported to the other languages in a fairly bulletproof way.

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

#164

Post by zmj »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #50
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…

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…

I agree in large, but there are some rough edges.

-It's wordy. The var keyword was a step in the right direction, but there's still a lot of redundant type information, even compared to other statically typed languages like Go or F#.

-Legacy code. A lot of things that are concise and easy in C# 3.5+ were possible but hideous in older versions. Sadly, that code must still be maintained.

-Null handling. Like another commenter, I wish the language would help more with null values. I'd love an operator to do monadic null coalescing: var foo = thing1.thing2.thing3.bar; Sometimes I want foo to be null if any of the chained objects are null.

It's a pretty good language, though. I'm looking forward to the Roslyn API to the compiler: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh500769

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

#165

Post by drbawb »

postfuturist wrote: post #7

Looks like 'Go' is missing, 'Lisp' should probably be 'Common Lisp' since Scheme and Clojure are also 'Lisp'.

Same here.

Also obligatory #golang so people can search for it on the page! (Had to sift through every "x hours a to find this thread.)

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

#167

Post by gruuk »

Perl, especially when parsing and manipulating text files. Still the best glue language between applications that don't like each other, such as when the output from one is incompatible with the input of the other (of course, vendor of second app promised it would be compatible). The only downside after perl saves the day is that it makes whoever decided to buy that application look far less bad than they deserve.

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

#168

Post by neeleshs »

ben_straub wrote: post #157
Inufu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If code can be written by auto completion, it's by definition redundant and IMHO shouldn't be necessary in the first place.

No, it's more like the IDE is augmenting your brain and fingers. The code comes out readable, but you only have to type a fraction of the characters. It's a code-writing assistant robot. Also, it makes APIs incredibly discoverable. Not sure what a `IQueryable` provides? IQueryable iq = null; iq. and scroll through the popup. Instant one-line descriptions are available in the tooltips, and you can get full documentati…

Agree on the discovery part, this is the biggest reason why I stay away from vim.

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

#169

Post by masklinn »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #87
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Func is just the type signature they use for lambdas. The syntax allows fully inline functions now: () => { DoSomething(); } No return value needed (compiles down to an Action I think)

> No return value needed (compiles down to an Action I think)

Which is an other crufty thing in C#: because Void/() is not a type (inherited from Java), it needs to have both `Func` and `Action` in order to handle functions-with-a-return-value and functions-without-a-return-value.

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