>0 anonymous @ 2020/08/18 17:54
I personally would like to take a deep dive into C, but currently I use python/shell for most things. What is your favourite programming language.
>1 Geo @ 2020/08/19 03:02
>>OP As uncool as it is, my *favorite* language to actually use is probably Java. It's got a huge amount of libraries to help you with stuff, it's a very "regular" language (the syntax doesn't do anything esoteric), it has excellent backwards compatibility and has been around a while, a great developer ecosystem, and it has pretty good cross platform support. It's a been overwhelming at the beginning, but once you get comfortable with it, it's very powerful. It's really just super useful for general programming. For sysadmin type stuff, shell scripting is my preferred choice since it's so easy to manipulate stuff with it, and since I've recently started using Emacs, I find elisp to be pretty nice for text processing. And C is great, lots of open source projects use it and it's generally pretty fun, but I don't like it on large projects because C is a nightmare at scale and it enables so many subtle and difficult to fix bugs, especially around memory manipulation. I think I'd like Rust, but I haven't really given it a try yet, and I've heard it has quite a steep learning curve in the beginning...
>2 annathecrow @ 2020/08/20 10:57
>>OP I'm probably gonna ruin my cred here, but from the langs I've used, I enjoy JavaScript the most. It's not the *best* language by far, but it's the one I'm having the most fun with. I suspect the fun bits for me are the same things that other people would hate, lol. It changes all the time, it's very forgiving about different code styles, there's a million approaches and frameworks to choose from. For scripting utilities, I usually go with bash or python, though. \*shrugs\* mostly for practice, tbh.
>3 anonymous @ 2020/08/20 17:23
>>OP My favorite programming language is probably Guile. It's basically Scheme but with a sane standard library and an optimizing compiler. I'm a very big (yuge, maybe even the yugest) fan of Lisp-like semantics and S-expressions; they do look kind of ugly and most people aren't used to them, but as a person who uses programming languages didactically (i.e. as a medium to teach about algorithms) I feel like Scheme's approach to functions is the most native, especially for those who have absolutely no idea about programming (i.e. freshmen). There is a reason why the Wizard Book uses Scheme :^) When it comes to "actually programming", I'm a Scala/Clojure user. Java is a flawed language but a taste of FP really makes it easier to cope with. I do want to learn Haskell some time, but Clojure is pretty much as robust as Haskell and it even has dynamic typing, which I would prefer over Haskell's strong/static typing discipline.
>4 kalium @ 2020/08/22 10:07
>>2 Eh, me too. I guess it makes sense because I got my start coding personal web pages (that and pet sim modding, but that didn't involve any languages at the time). I think it's a logical next step, especially when all you have is a static page. Uncool though it may be, it's still knd of fun to make webpages do silly things. May not be the best, sure, but it's what I'm familiar with and fall back to.
>5 swiftmandolin @ 2020/08/25 04:03
>>OP I really enjoy Swift as a mobile developer. Its a really cool language. Also, PHP gets a lot of hate, but I honestly like it. I mean, its the wild, wild west, but I still like it.
>6 jacksonbenete @ 2020/08/28 05:20
As a "retired" software developer, I've learned a lot of languages and I liked a lot of them. It's kinda hard to pick one because each of them might have something cooler or do a job better than others. What can I say is that I do more work with python and javascript/node. I love Julia, but I don't really use it. I like script languages, shell scripting is a must but I recently wrote some PowerShell and liked it's features a lot more than shell, but since my servers are usually unix, I have more utility for Bash/SH than PS. I find Lua kinda cool but I don't believe much into investing my time into it. I'm learning Racket right now, I've avoided Lisp for a long time but it's time to learn it for good and I'm regretting considering how cool Racket is. >>3 I agree that "Lisp" can be very didatic specially if OP have a good math background, but in my country a lot of developers lacks basic mathematics believe me or not. I need to learn awk further, it already saved me a lot even without knowing it well, and I should study regex, I'm very stupid regarding regex although I know how useful it can be as other people regex have saved me multiple times. Good to know that we're among coders. :)
>7 anthk @ 2022/01/17 21:42
>>OP Perl/Bash as a quick fix. Jimtcl as a tool do crazy stuff with few lines and jimtcl's extensions. Learning C for some fixes on tools I use daily. And calc(1), but that's a calculator with C syntax. Useful with Gnuplot.
>8 anonymous @ 2022/01/18 20:49
As a hobbyist programmer, I learned to code through Python and it's still my go-to whenever I want to write anything "serious". Recently I've been coding in Kotlin and I really like it too. Languages I'd like to learn more about include Go, Julia and Lisp. Looking into statically typed languages like Kotlin has actually made me realise that Python's dynamic typing is more of a hindrance than a help. However, Python's library ecosystem is really excellent, there is basically a library for everything.
>9 hifikuno @ 2022/02/07 00:49
>>OP Like alot of the others I mainly use Python whenever doing something personally. However, for work I use almost purely SQL. I remember in uni hating SQL because it was boring and repetitive, but now that I'm working on a data warehouse it's alot different.
>10 anonymous @ 2022/02/08 10:45
I prefer shell-scripting for small tasks. (bash/fish) Rust for others...
>11 jdtron @ 2022/02/15 16:58
As a full time developer with a lot of different projects I've used a lot of languages in my life. Mainly they were all focused about web stuff, so PHP/JS/Node were the things I mainly wrote my code in. But things have changed a lot since and nowadays I build most of my appications with Go. Go is a very nice composed language with lots of thoughtful language design to make dev's life easier. And the toolchain is honestly the best I've ever seen. While it is a little of a headache sometimes to get into, things get comfy very fast. Building pretty fast web applicaitons with all assets compiled into the binary is also a thing I like very much. The embedding feature is really something I'm in love with. And it's also pretty nice for cloud native stuff, too. For scripting small things I use shell scripts, trying to be as POSIX compliant as possible.
>12 kayvr @ 2022/02/17 21:33
C++. I use it like C but with the C++ standard library and RAII. Bash on simple things. Python for Math (matlab replacement) or for more involved shell scripts.
>13 anonymous @ 2022/02/24 00:29
>>8 10 years ago I would have said python; and today I'm gonna say python. That's gotta speak for something. But teaching modern python packages managment to beginners makes me want to scream.
>14 phoebe @ 2022/03/03 21:28
Rust. It's a hassle, but I just find it a lot of fun. Beyond that, C/C++ and JavaScript are favourites of mine,
>15 gritty @ 2022/03/10 14:17
Python. But in a previous life, when I tried my hand at being a professional programmer, I did mostly web languages. Javascript, PHP, .NET/C#, etc. Enterprise level coding really opened my eyes to quite a different world than what you learn at uni. I mostly hobby code, and when I do it's in Python. I'm currently looking at building a Gemini app - and I'm planning to watch ~Tomasino's recently posted video on how to do so in Python, though I want to use SCGI in molly brown instead of regular CGI.
>16 jan6 @ 2022/03/16 23:51
>>OP favourite: posix shell scripts, although I like (or admire) a lot of languages, including Haxe, V, Go, Wren, Lua, Python, etc... there's no real reason WHY I like posix sh, it's just what I always try to start things in, only changing language if it proves too complex, I guess it's sorta like a challenge, to have it be portable everywhere and whatnot... I've a very special set of personal rules for a "great" language, and for that, the only one that fits, is Haxe... maybe I should try learning Go sometime, other than Haxe, the only candidates have been Go (decent, but a lot of projects require significantly-sized dependencies), and Nim (has godawful error messages, but also otherwise seems decent), and I guess V (aka vlang), tho V's a bit much in flux, for quite some time even the provided examples didn't work, despite claiming support of openbsd, it didn't actually support openbsd's sockets (till I asked about it), etc etc and FYI, among my requirements are that it must be user-installable, and not take too much space, and the result must be easily distributable and small, which automatically rules out a quite big part of the selection, lol (even haxe, actually requires obscure options to install in homedir, and has serious lack of documentation)
>17 jacksonbenete @ 2022/03/19 00:35
Two years since my post in this thread. I've learned awk, nice tool in my belt and I'm constantly trying to get advantage of situations to use it. I'm working professionally as a Software Developer again, so I am "unretired". I'm working with Elixir. Even though I prefer Erlang, Elixir is a nice language and I'm quite pleased with it. Lisp was my last favourite language, but I would guess that Erlang/Elixir are doing just fine as both toys and tools. I still have to play more with LFE though, as it's Lisp on BEAM, meaning Lisp and Erlang had a child, best from my two favourite languages. I'm studying APL which is a new passion of mine right now. I'm quite serious about it though, and devoting my weekends on it when I don't have extra work to do. (Yeah, I'm constantly working on weekends) So, lately, Elixir, APL and AWK.
>18 spencerwi @ 2022/07/08 18:54
F# and OCaml are the ones I definitely _enjoy_ the most, and Java's my "native" language, so to speak, and these days it's pretty alright (Java 17 is pretty decent to work with). I like Crystal, but the dev tooling's not really there yet. It takes the things I like about Ruby and adds the things I wish Ruby had: a compiler and a static typechecker.
>19 jacksonbenete @ 2022/07/08 23:32
>>18 Oh I just read a book on F# recently (I didn't finished it though but I will). I was quite jealous, the language is awesome and it's quite close to be the language I enjoyed the most learning about. Tooling is fantastic. Unfortunately the fact that it have close to zero job positions available quite drives me off, at least right now. I'm in a moment that I'm trying to guarantee some stability so I'm trying to study some languages with more opportunities. I recently started studying Scala since it have so many job positions, and I'm quite enjoying. When I was studying F# there are some things that I missed from Elixir, and when I was coding Elixir in my day job I was missing many things from F#. Now that I'm studying Scala I guess I'll miss things from both. haha
>20 spencerwi @ 2022/07/11 02:47
>>19 Scala is really cool, and it has a double-edged sword of extreme flexibility -- it sometimes seems to me that it might be easier to find two identical fingerprints in the world than to find two Scala codebases that are written in the same style. And since Scala is _so_ flexible, that variance is across a wider "range", so to speak; you might as well have to learn an entirely new language when picking up a new codebase. Is this codebase one that's using Scala as "Java but a bit nicer" or is it one where someone looked at Haskell and thought "what if we made it a bit _more_ esoteric?" There's a classic divide between a Pythonic "there is exactly one way to do things" and the Perl "there is more than one way to do things", and I think with Golang and Scala respectively we have even further extremes in those two directions: Scala Perl Python Golang <---more ways-----|-------fewer ways-----|---------> (but that's mostly because Golang feels like there's exactly one way to do things, but the language designers didn't feel like actually building it all the way, so you must constantly boilerplate it in yourself)
>21 tash @ 2022/09/22 03:57
>>OP
Personally I like C++ the most due to mainly three factors:
* The power it gives me over the system.
* The wonderful abstraction it allows for.
* The decades worth of support/tooling/documentation/libraries.
I do not know of any other language that ticks all of those boxes.
Sure, C is powerful and has tons of support,
but the abstraction just isn't there.
Python is full of abstraction and support,
but doesn't have the raw power I'm looking for.
Rust has great abstraction and all the power I want,
but the libraries and support just don't cut it.
I could go on and on with every other programming language that
I know about, but you get the point.
Power, support, and abstraction; a truly wonderful combination.
The only real gripe I have with it is that it predates Unicode, and therefore
supporting it is a bit more difficult than most languages.
>22 bread @ 2022/10/24 12:36
It's gotta be C for me, whenever I want to try out something I just open up vi and start typing, though for graphical stuff LOVE2D with Lua is great too.
>23 rainystorm @ 2022/10/25 18:10
>>OP shell, vimscript (underrated imho) python is nice and rich C is really cool, feels like the 60s from what I heard of it.
>24 iddqd404 @ 2024/01/11 21:51
I discovered Dart when I switched to Flutter for mobile development, and I gotta say I love it! It has a very clear syntax, it's very easy to learn, and it helps making things like working with async/await super easy.
>25 leach @ 2024/01/15 19:26
>>OP I'd say I'm most proficient in Java as that's what I learned in school. I'm also pretty decent with python but I'm not as comfortable with it as Java. Bash for small things I just need done on my computer, and I've wanted to learn a bit of Rust. I'm also vaguely farmiliar with swift as every once in a blue moon I find a niche thing I want to do that doesn't exist and make it in xcode. usually something small and simple I want to carry around on my phone. Though there is much many google searches and hacky code in this scenario.
>26 vagabond @ 2024/02/12 05:36
I'm the most comfortable with Javascript, then Typscript, but lately I've I've been learning Rust, and wow, it's an incredibly well thought out language. You want to do anything that might be remotely unsafe? You have to explicitly make it so. Very smart. I don't know it super well, but I can see it quickly becoming my language of choice.
>27 jdtron @ 2024/02/13 16:34
>>26 Similar story here. Been a PHP developer for a decade. Learned to love Rust and now mostly our whole backend engineering team uses Rust to create super fast and reliable stuff. Even our frontend people started looking into Rust to use it with WASM.
>28 vagabond @ 2024/02/14 05:51
>>27 Oh yeah, WASM was one of the big reasons why I looked into rust, being primarily a front-end dev myself.
>29 bacon @ 2024/02/15 07:42
I find Haskell pretty fun. It's got some cool stuff, I like the syntactic sugar.
>30 nebula @ 2024/02/16 22:34
i really like common lisp, but usually find myself using other languages due to wanting to work on the web or library availability. but lisp makes the most sense to me and i admire it the most. emacs lisp is good too
>31 percent20 @ 2024/02/18 03:04
i really love this thread! i did not expect such a diverse set of answers, and now i feel pretty vanilla! i use python as my primary professional and hobby language. i work for a microsoft shop, and while most of our team are C# (SW) and C (FW) i'm able to find my niche as there are just some things that python is better for. also linux, eh? i use bash scripting for a bunch, and have recently toyed around with the rust using the rust book. i must say... in terms of symantics and documentation... wow! if you haven't tried rust and work with embedded or coding that requires memory safety (that's all of us), type safety or thread safety, give it a go! interestingly, the NSA (usa) has made some recommendations on such languages > Recommended memory safe programming languages mentioned in the > CSI include C#, Go, Java, Python, Rust, and Swift. cheers! https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Press-Release-View/Article/3608324/us-and-international-partners-issue-recommendations-to-secure-software-products/
>32 subtra3t @ 2024/02/18 06:35
I don't program a lot but when I do its usually Python or JavaScript. I've tried dabbling in niche languages like Pony and V but never stuck with anything for more than a few months.
>33 anthk @ 2024/03/08 10:14
>>OP awk, awka for a bit of performance, C for simple stuff, I plan to learn ncurses programming. Gnuplot for plots. But I use calc(1) (it's easier than bc) for unlimited precision on calculations. https://github.com/lcn2/calc
>34 ebruce613 @ 2024/04/08 05:30
Rust. It's supposed to be hard to learn, but if you just ease in gently without going into the overly complex topics it isn't too hard. I'm still on a begginer/intermediate level though.