Favorite Programming Language

[Moonythedwarf]

(I wasn't sure this fitted in 'Coding', if i must i'll move it)
Talk about your favorite programming language(s)!
Talk about the do's and dont's, the tips and tricks
Let me start.... Rust
Rust is practically amazing, in my opinion, for both its portability (as long as LLVM can work for that platform) and its flexibility.
I like its memory safety oriented design and its immense flexibility for extending the compiler (Nightly only) and the fact it can work in most environments (See redox os, which has its kernel written in almost pure rust).
It even has a online sandbox if you want to try it, so may as well link a few resources:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/
https://play.rust-lang.org/
https://www.rust-lang.org/

[Flumble]

The right board is called Religious Wars. Because taste can be argued and my favourite language is my favourite simply because it's the best.

Haskell (and friends, though I'm only familiar with Haskell) makes me feel funny because of its extensive pattern matching and lazy evaluation ...and types ...and composition ...and basically everything that is modern functional programming. I just love combining functions to create a complex data transformation without having to use variables. Most languages include a map and sometimes a reduce and filter nowadays, but I can't just put length . cyclesOfSize 4 in that map. Instead, it would require a whole inline function graph => length(cyclesOfSize(4, graph)) —where's my point-free utopia?

But other than making me swoon over type theory and being smart at evaluating simple programs, I like it just as much as a lot of other languages. I have yet to give TypeScript and Rust a go.

[Tub]

Languages are tools, not pets. Use the right tool for the right job. As awesome as rust's safety guarantees are, sometimes a bash one-liner is all you need.

So far, every language I met had *some* use case where it shines, and *some* use case where it's a poor choice.

[Soupspoon]

For ease of use in proving a concept: Perl (controversial, I know, if only for it being more a scripting language)

For stability/universality: I generally fall back on one or other generation of core C, depending upon the minutiae of the hardware interface/abstraction methods needed and allowed.

If I just want to create a Windows application with click buttons and things but no actual finesse: I'll dig up my Delphi disks (or perhaps go get Lazarus, if it plays better on newer platforms).

I've yet to settle on a 'modern' platform for contemporary (and potentially cross-platform) App development, still mostly jumping between the C family members, according to what various DevKits seem to best support, but there are so many options available...

And then there's the language of my own development (for a quarter of a century, now... wow, time flies!), an esoteric ultra-RISC (four instructions¹) code base that'd probably run economically on an FPGA assembly, but mostly I'm messing about in other languages to create virtial platforms, rather than using it as a language itself... It's probably just what I turn to when I need reassurance that I'm better at something than anybody else, based on the fact that nobody else even knows about it.


¹ None of this "any or all operands can be literal, absolute reference, relative reference, indirect reference via another (absolute/relative/register) reference, etc, in any combination, but it's still the same instruction!" thing...

[Xenomortis]

So far, every language I met had *some* use case where it shines, and *some* use case where it's a poor choice.

What was Java's "shining" example?

*runs*

[Flumble]

So far, every language I met had *some* use case where it shines, and *some* use case where it's a poor choice.

What was Java's "shining" example?

That was JavaServer Pages, right?

I guess it shines at being semi-cross-platform and embeddable in browsers in the 90s.
And it has millions of code snippets and libraries and tutorials and examples, so, if you need to quickly hack something together, it may as well be the best suited language for your problem.

[Demki]

So far, every language I met had *some* use case where it shines, and *some* use case where it's a poor choice.

What was Java's "shining" example?

*runs*

C#.

I prefer Haskell tho. Hell, when I need a quick calculation(read: wait, what was sin (exp 3.12) again? Ah, right -0.61...), I just open up a shell and type "ghci" and do my calculations, why bother with some builtin calculator application?
Well, I sometimes just type simple expressions into google if I have the browser open.

[Tub]

And I was trying SO hard not to bash anything

Sure, java got a lot of things wrong that c# eventually got right, but writing code for the JVM opens up a whole ecosystem of useful tools for deploying, managing, juggling and even cloudifying the resulting software. That's unlikely to be useful for private projects, homework or finishing project euler, but remember that most of the world's software development is done internally by corporations in order to solve a business problem. And for some of those problems, java is the best choice.

Java is also useful if you get paid by LoC.

[Derek]

So far, every language I met had *some* use case where it shines, and *some* use case where it's a poor choice.

What was Java's "shining" example?

*runs*

The standard library is god tier. No other language even compares to it. If I need to write something that I know is going to need to depend on a lot of stuff that I don't want to implement myself, I'll probably use Java just for the library.

I actually don't find Java significantly more verbose than any other language. Especially now that it has lambdas. In fact, I find Java universally less verbose than C++. The lack of good list comprehensions is the only thing that's really missing from it now. Most of the verbosity and boilerplate that I see in practice comes from the style of coding, not the language. In particular dependency injection creates a lot of boilerplate code and encourages the use of providers and factories that increase verbosity. However dependency injection is not in any way tied to Java. You can write Java without it, and you can use it in any language. Furthermore, there are good reasons to use dependency injection, the most significant of which is that it makes unit testing much easier. But if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. Don't use DI in your code, use lambdas liberally, and skip out on some other boilerplate (like using public members instead of getters) and Java isn't verbose at all.

I'm not saying it's a perfect language or anything, there are a lot of flaws I could mention, but those are all shared by many other languages as well. But the main criticism I see is that it's verbose, and I don't agree with that.

[Qaanol]

I’m a fan of Swift nowadays.

[Bane Harper]

PHP and SQL are my favorite...

[Thesh]

Are you a masochist?

[commodorejohn]

C, FreeBasic, and Motorola 680x0 assembly language. Bonus round goes to Forth for "language I strongly suspect I'd really like if I took the time to wrap my head around it."