Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

I voted for Ruby and JavaScript because that's what I use. I've tried some Python/Django but it somehow didn't feel right. I guess it really comes down to your personal preferences.

With "now", polshaw is referring to "this moment in the life of this thread", not "this moment in the life of HN" - so it's not about how HN has gotten worse, just that big threads like the C# one can push other meaningful parts of the discussion way down. It's not because it's always been that way that it's ideal.

C# includes the static LINQ method "FirstOrDefault()" for any types implementing IEnumerable, e.g.:

    var firstNumber = numbers.FirstOrDefault();

(This isn't strictly the same as what you described if "None" is different from "null".) Once such a method exists, does it matter how many lines of code it is written in? I posit that every language feature in a reasonably intelligently designed language serves a valuable purpose, and that everybody has different needs, and the verbosity in C# serves certain needs.

Here's an implementation in C# that is a function on types T implementing the IList interface (rather than IEnumerable like LINQ does):

    public static T Head(this IList list) {
      return (list == null || list.Count == 0) ? null : list[0];
    }

It is used in the same way as the FirstOrDefault() example above. Much more verbose, I'll agree! But the real question for this thread is is it less convenient, and if so why? All the verbosity stems from just a few logical places:

1. the 'option' function you have in your example. In reality, your 'option' is doing all the work I did above, which means that comparing the verbosity of your sample code to the C# equivalent of FirstOrDefault() is perfectly valid in my opinion :)

2. the explicit return type. This serves a valuable purpose in my opinion.

With your code, it's easy to break the hd function by changing the implementation to return a different type. You might not even notice the bug if the different type's implementation is close enough to the right one. I once had a bug like this in VB6 years ago: I changed a method to use an integer instead of a string, and VB's automatic type casting happily allowed the rest of my code to function... until in the middle of a demo I ran a function I hadn't tested and default value of 0 broke something expecting an empty string! My lesson: type inference can be dangerous.

It also makes refactoring a large project much more difficult in my opinion because there is no way to distinguish between specification and implementation. Consequently, changing your implementation runs the risk of breaking your specification without being informed.

There is a school of thought that says your unit tests should cover this aspect of the specification... but then all I'm doing is implementing explicit types in a roundabout way - let the compiler do that I say! That being said I don't know if ML/Haskell have 'interface specification' types to ward against this, where you need it (and everywhere else you get to save on verbosity)? That would be a nice improvement to C#: private methods can use extended type inference, anything public (including implementing an interface) need to be more explicit.

3. syntax: visibility (public), static modifier and return statement. This is a matter of personal preference. With Resharper in Visual Studio each of these words costs me 2 or 3 keystrokes, and if I like I can use templated code snippets to reduce that for any situation, so I'm not too bothered :)

PHP

Racket http://www.racket-lang.org/