If by "F" the author means F#, he has no idea of what he's talking about. The language is open source with an Apache license.
Yup, it was F#.
The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
21–30 of 166 posts
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#22Wow, amazing article! Thanks!
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#23No mention of Lua? I guess the author hasn't tried it yet, either. (I haven't, but I was curious about his opinion on the language.)
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#24No Groovy? If you want to address which is the best JVM language, you've got to at least mention Groovy. Its advantages include being trivial to learn for the vast hordes of Java developers, while making programming a lot more fun in a Ruby-like way.
When to use it? When you want the JVM, and productivity is a bigger concern than performance.
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#25Based on the code snippet, I'm not surprised he thinks C# is "verbose" with "lots of boilerplate" and "resembles Java", because the snippet is written as if it WAS Java, or at least written 10 years ago. Compare his GetFrequencies implementation with idiomatic, LINQ version: http://pastie.org/8834650
I know nothing about C#, but I keep hearing announements of Groovy-like features in C#, and to me, Groovy is what Java should be (but with better performance). If C# is really like Groovy with better performance, then it should be a very nice language indeed.
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#26«The first true object-oriented language. But it seems to me Smalltalk is pretty much a forgotten language.» Why do so many people kill Smalltalk so fast? I could give so many URLs to illustrate how Smalltalk has a stable and growing community, with so many open projects and people making a living out of it, teaching it in universities and using it for research, but I think these two links sum it all up: http://forum…
> Why do so many people kill Smalltalk so fast? Because it doesn't have curly braces. Entirely unfair, but it seems like if you want to sneak in an innovative language it needs to be a wolf in sheep's clothes. (IE: it need to vaguely resemble C)
That's one of the big reasons why javascript is so horrible. It is a really nice and innovative language, but it had to be dressed up to resemble C (or Java really).
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#27Based on the code snippet, I'm not surprised he thinks C# is "verbose" with "lots of boilerplate" and "resembles Java", because the snippet is written as if it WAS Java, or at least written 10 years ago. Compare his GetFrequencies implementation with idiomatic, LINQ version: http://pastie.org/8834650
Same for his PHP examples. He seems to have picked notably horrible examples for the languages he doesn't really like.
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I am as anti-Microsoft as the next guy, but C# is one of the few "insanely great" things they have. edit: I'm not just blowing hot air, I've actually wrote C# code that went into production.
I'm someone who has put lots of C# into production and whilst you're right, caution has to be used when using LINQ. There are several humungous hand grenades that will go off in production unless you really 100% understand how it works (memory ballooning, infinite sequences, total misunderstanding of log complexity, leaky abstractions and difficulty of debugging).
LINQ is a tool, and a great one. But just as you need to understand malloc when writing C, you need to understand the basics of LINQ to use it in production. The main problems I've come across are all failure to understand delayed evaluation. Maybe I'm not using it in a complex way, but as soon as it start to feel too complex, LINQ is not the way to go.
I agree that it can be difficult to debug - that's why it should be kept simple. Personally, I love that LINQ enables me to think of my data in terms of sets and operations on them, rather how to execute the operations on the data.
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#29I love how F# is among the "unreasonable languages". Why? Because it's "Microsoft trying to be cool", "many of us have learned to keep away from Microsoft the hard way" and "we have enough company-sponsored languages already". That's it.
I was surprised by that one, as I have not tried it, but it does sound like one of Microsoft's nicer efforts when I read about it.
I have only played with it a little, but so far - it's like OCaml, with a "MS Approved" badge.
Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)
#30Have you ever seem a simple Prolog program solving the 'four coloring problem'? Try programming that in anything else. Prolog or something similar like Lisp with pattern matching is the tool of choice for speech recognition programs. Why these tools get dismissed in a world of tablet devices using Siri or Google is beyond me.