Live data from Hacker News

Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

news.ycombinator.com

441–450 of 626 posts

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

#441
Does anyone here feel that all of these programming languages have their own flaws? I started programming 8 years ago (mostly as a hobby), and I feel like all these languages are missing something. That said, my "favourite" language is Haskell, but I don't really like it. I've only used Haskell since a year ago and there are still many concepts I have to master. Maybe my feelings will improve, but if they do it won't be by that much in absolute terms.

Emacs and Vim? Twenty years later and these are still the state of the art? Even when our computers are at least 1000 times more performant? I guess there are IDE's out there trying to do better, but in the end I'm still typing text into a computer, occasionally getting autocompletes that is exactly what I want, but usually its not.

Do I like programming? Yes I do, I like programming more than I hate the tools I have to use.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind if I ask why? Not being defensive, just curious.

Well, I'm not the gp, but I am a former C# guy who's happy to be out of that world. 1) I dislike C#'s types; they're neither as strong and intelligent as a ML/Haskell language nor as convenient as a Python/Ruby family language. 2) I much prefer the sense of design displayed by Python and Ruby open source projects over C#. (Not that there aren't issues there!) 3) I hate Visual Studio. Nice debugger, crappy interface f…

Same boat, but still wrestling with windows at work. I've got a workable configuration with Cygwin, and mingw32. Hey Visual Studio's IDE (2008) may be full of cruft but the debugger isn't too bad. Vs2010 feels broken, I gave up creating projects in VS, and now use a simple combination of ruby and cmake for creating solutions/projects.

http://www.victusspiritus.com/2011/10/30/an-elegant-ruby-scr...

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

#443
Meh... this childish vote again...

Still surprised that python is the most popular. I would expect (nothing against those two fine languages) coffeescript and ruby fanboys to flood the poll. I guess many hackers prefer to do their job discretely instead of being vocal about it.

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

#447
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…

I feel the same way, my problem is it usually starts while I'm learning a new language, so I might drop the current to pick up another, which I of course drop again etc. pp... I'm learning Haskell atm which seems to be the first language that captures my interest even after months. (the announcement of Julia made me think of dropping it, though)

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

#448
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you would like clojure.

No. I tried it but it fails in two ways: 1) all the libraries are it takes advantage of are written in Java and this doesn't fit the closure style of coding at all. 2) the available tools just suck. Sorry, but without autocompletion the time it takes to write something balloons way, way too high. I guess 2 would have been less of an issue 20 years ago -- back then most of the IDEs that we use today did exist -- but i…

Totally agree with you on 1). I found Clojure uses Java libraries even for the most basic stuff, and that forced you into unLisp like code. That is acceptable for Java folk, but when you want to stay closer to Lisp, that's a problem.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a statically typed language mind you. If you're passing something around as values, you're gonna need to declare what its type is (of course there's type inference, but that just turns it into a totally different language)

> If you're passing something around as values, you're gonna need to declare what its type is I fail to see the relation this has with my issue.

You should need to know whether you require the lambda you're accepting to return some value or not, and its type.
Post reply on HN