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Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

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

#111
post #21

It's funny. Every time I use a new language, or go back to an old favourite, it becomes my favorite language for a time. Static typing? Wonderful error messages! Dynamic typing? It does what I want! Functional programming? This is the future of programming! Object-oriented programming? I can describe the world! Low level? My code is fast . High level? My code is *expressive. Is this normal or is it just me? Don't you…

That's the right attitude. Each popular language has its strengths and shortcomings. As long as you enjoy it and get the job done, it's a good language. What I can't stand are people dissing other languages to make their language look good. It's like they have to justify their insecure choice of their language by bringing down the others.

As for Perl, I used to hate Perl for its many arcane ways of doing the same thing, but I then forced myself to do some Perl scripts at a job and it's not too bad. It got the jobs done. Since then I've used Perl for many quick scripts.

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

#112
post #2

I find it difficult to divorce 'favourite language' from 'favourite stack'. I use C# a lot, and I love it. But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) so recently I've switched to using node.js and CoffeeScript in my projects. It's fantastic. So right now my favourite language is JavaScript/CoffeeScript, but just because of the things I can do with it.

But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC is much, much less heavy than the original ASP.NET (if that's what you're referring to). This is especially the case if you use the Razor syntax for your views.

Being a little offtopic, but I have a personal pet peeve with ASP.NET MVC ... since they bothered to release it as open-source, why are they keeping Razor as a binary blob? Shit, why are they keeping ASP.NET itself as closed source?

This is something that always bothered me about Microsoft-related stuff. Right now I'm using Python and Django for web development. I'm also using Ruby on Rails for a side project. Having access to the source code is vital for me as I've become accustomed to reading a lot of source code. And reading source-code for lack of better documentation is sweet, but then I went further and for instance I also copy/pasted a lot of snippets straight from Django's source code, or worked-around bugs by patching components.

That's why I consider open-source to be superior, regardless of all the polish that Microsoft is able to apply to their products. I'm a software developer, not your average user. Just as a sports-car racer would find unacceptable the lack of access to the internals of her own car, I find unacceptable the lack of source-code that I can read, modify and distribute.

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

#113

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…

Writing C# code in Visual Studio feels almost like telepathy. Intellisense is so good that, it nearly writes 30-40% of total code.

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

#114

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…

Closure compiler is also very useful for making JS a bit more safe and fast

https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/

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

#115
post #2

I find it difficult to divorce 'favourite language' from 'favourite stack'. I use C# a lot, and I love it. But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) so recently I've switched to using node.js and CoffeeScript in my projects. It's fantastic. So right now my favourite language is JavaScript/CoffeeScript, but just because of the things I can do with it.

But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC is much, much less heavy than the original ASP.NET (if that's what you're referring to). This is especially the case if you use the Razor syntax for your views.

Oh, I know, and it is much better. But the whole stack is still heavy- compare setting up an ASP.NET MVC site and IIS to node.js's "http.createServer()". There's no comparison.

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

#117
post #32

Mathematica. But not because of the language - it has some warts. But because of the problems I'm working on when I choose Mathematica as a tool.

Nice try Stephen.

FYI, canned reddit-esque responses don't go over too well here.

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

#118
Moonscript (voted for Coffeescript and Lua). It's like Coffeescript for Lua instead of JavaScript, which is great of you need a fast and concise language to embed in another application (compiling the standard lua interpreter for a platform consists mostly of dragging the source to your IDE and compiling). ( http://moonscript.org/ )

I also love OCaml (and miss it's static inferred typing and pattern matching everywhere else), but it's ecosystem has never fit with what I'm working on outside of coursework in it.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC is much, much less heavy than the original ASP.NET (if that's what you're referring to). This is especially the case if you use the Razor syntax for your views.

Being a little offtopic, but I have a personal pet peeve with ASP.NET MVC ... since they bothered to release it as open-source, why are they keeping Razor as a binary blob? Shit, why are they keeping ASP.NET itself as closed source? This is something that always bothered me about Microsoft-related stuff. Right now I'm using Python and Django for web development. I'm also using Ruby on Rails for a side project. Having…

That hasn't been a problem for me personally, but I see where you're coming from.

For pure debugging purposes, have you tried using a decompiler? For reasonably well-written (and not obfuscated, naturally) code, the decompiler output is remarkably clear.

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