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Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

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

#591
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly didn't write it to be incendiary, and I don't read it that way? I'm not going to go back and edit it, but I'll ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt that I meant it to be as as far from incendiary as possible.

The perhaps unfortunate metaphor the womb implies is that developing in MS tools is like being a defenseless premature baby who needs to be protected from the big bad world until they come to full term and leave the MS environment behind.

To me, this metaphor could be extended to [whatever environment you first really liked]

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

#592

I see a lot of votes for python, but a disproportionately small representation of python fans in the comments. If you asked me a year ago, I'dve said python. But lately, I've been using Clojure for personal projects, and it's making python seem just... boring. (I get the same feeling when I write in Ruby too) The "one right way" paradigm is a great one, and the language is solid. The built-ins are top-notch, and whil…

> I see a lot of votes for python, but a disproportionately small representation of python fans in the comments. This is probably because describing the virtues of Python (clean & simple syntax, one right way to do everything, easy-to-use yet comprehensive standard library) just feels like beating a dead horse. Almost everybody in this community has heard of Python. The circle-jerk factor on HN is still somewhat low…

Python is more powerful can be ported to any language :)

http://www.megawrz.com/python/

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

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...go towards C (or occasionally even fortran) when I > need something faster Try cython next time.

Or PyPy.

Since he's specifically saying that he does scientific computing, PyPy is not a good suggestion. Pretty much all of the codebases of the stack for scientific computing can not be used in PyPy, and this will most likely not change in the foreseeable future since porting them is non-trivial.

I'm not trying to talk down PyPy here, but for this domain of application, it's not appropriate at the moment.

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

#595
post #516
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as #4 is concerned, windows is not configurable and the "command line" is an absolute joke, which renders the idea that it has a better developer experience absolute rubbish :) The command line is super powerful and highly convenient in a developers hands.

Seeing as how I've been developing for the last 15 years on Windows and haven't found the lack of a *nixy command line to be an issue I'd love to know what you're doing that I'm not :)

Well, the command line basically means you have the power of a full programmming language at your fingertips for administrating your system, your projects, your build system, etc.

Also, the homogeneity of the unix interface (pipes and utilities that uses them) means that you also have very powerful primitives to work with.

Proving the utility of the command line could benefit from a few full featured examples, but this would need a longer post that i'm in the mood of writing right now :)

With that said, you have a powerful administration programming language on windows called powershell. It's much better than bash by a lot of metrics. The way it's integrated into the system is not very good though. For example, the terminal client sucks, and the security system is way too complicated for casual use.

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

#596
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity3d ships with Mono/C# and MonoDevelop as one of the programming language options for its game engine. I haven't used it as much, since I prefer the Javascript version, but most (if not all) high-end game developers opt for scripting in C#.

I'd be curious to hear, why. I will be working on a Unity3D project and the team wants me to use C# with VS. As a Mac user and Open Source fan, I didn't jump at the idea. Glad to hear, that a lot of people think C# is a good choice. I'm excited to learn it! Any suggestions for a good book or website? I've been programming in C and C++ quite a bit, but its been a few years. I've only been doing functional programming…

The thing to realize is that the Javascript isn't Javascript. It just looks like it. Writing good Unityscript/Javascript is going to be only syntactically different from writing C# anyway. Unityscript/Javascript is well made, but there's a few edge cases that you'll only encounter once you've already written most of the project. And mixing the two languages is messy and limited.

For C# dev, it depends how hardcore you're going to be getting. Ultimately, you normally going to be scripting, not programming. getting familiar with the Unity3D API is of more use than learning high level features of C#. For instance, while C# is object oriented, >90% of the things you write will inherit from MonoBehaviour, and most of the rest are just fancy structs.

And I code on an iMac -- I use Unity natively, and the version of MonoDevelop it ships with. It works nicely!

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

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with this. If only ruby or python had such a powerful development environment (sigh). There's simply nothing in the open source community that rivals the beautiful, simple power of that IDE and language combination. Tools matter when you're trying to ship code.

The beauty of Ruby and Python is that you aren't restricted to an IDE in order to use them; I wouldn't enjoy using them if I was. I like to choose my own tools. This isn't quite so easy when using an all-encompassing (and platform specific) IDE like Visual Studio. I use tmux (with tmuxinator), with windows for my editor, shell, debugger, source control, logs. I'm able to, effortlessly, change any part of it.

I used the Vim/Ruby combo for a long time but RubyMine pushed me from Vim to an IDE again (they aren't always bad).

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

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like I was more of a configuration engineer than software developer when I was working in VS. If I got stuck I would just start typing and then hit ctrl+space and scroll through intellisense to get the options that seemed to fit.

I get that feeling with all modern software engineering. Intellisense and similar environments at least try to make it bearable. How I long for the day of starting your project with only a blank document.

I guess that's why I gravitate towards JavaScript, still kinda the Wild West where we can still write things from scratch.

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

#599
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.

What the fuck is a stack?

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

#600
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my IDE writes 40% of my code it means i can call my functions ConnectToDatabaseCheckUserNameAndCountPosts() instead of ConDBusrCnt() just to save a few taps on the keyboard.

Vim doesn't write any code for me yet I can still have long function names because of the cutting edge magic of auto-completion.

Autocompletion is writing code for you. That's what we're talking about here, in large part.
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