Good old C. Simple to use, minimalistic, stays out of the way and allows me to do what I want while programming. My only problem with it is that is no longer really a low level language to due auto vectorization in modern compilers and kind of requires a PDP-11 style flat memory model to have full control. Although if I ever want full controll in the language I can drop down to inline assembly.
I like R because most everything is vectorized out of the box, and you can subset multiple ways. You can do stuff like
a = c(1,2,3,4) a - 1 # 0,1,2,3 a < 3 # T,T,F,F a + a # 2,4,6,8 a[a < 3] # 1,2Also map (“apply” functions in R) is implemented very intuitively, and R discourages you from doing anything object oriented.
Also Shiny is so cool.
PHP.
It picked a niche and fits exactly into it. It’s a language for server side web pages. It’s not a general purpose language shoehorned into the task, so it wisely sets boundaries. PHP could avoid a lot of async/await/promise hell because you can work in the mindset of HTTP requests-- terms of short lived requests that are compiled elsewhere. You don’t have fragile runtime environments (see: server-side JS), since it just plugs into Apache or Nginx, which are at least battle tested and known quantities to operate.
It’s batteries included. Hell, it’s the entire Duracell company included. The standard library is rich and centrally documented, including decades of community nitpicks, even before you go into composer repos.
It’s non judgmental. You can write procedural code, or object-oriented code, based on preference and fit to task.
It makes ad-hoc easy and formal possible-- If I need an array of [227, “Steve” => “meow”, 953 => new FreightLocomotive()] I can get it, or I can enforce types where it’s relevant and mitigates risk.
PHP really is such a forgiving language and easy to understand and get in to. My favorite part is that every time I have a seemingly very niche and specific use-case, there is a function that just does that thing perfectly and is already included in the base library.
You said it and I’ll reaffirm: the documentation and online library of SO questions/answers is absolutely priceless. Most of the older versions are still compatible with the latest version, so upgrading is simple and usually just means there are more features you can use now.
You ask a carpenter what his favorite tool is? I like languages that are fit for purpose, and I enjoy using them for that purpose.
I used bin/bash when I automated the backups at work and happy doing it. I was pulling my teeth out when I had to write code for communicating with Bluetooth devices in /bin/sh because that was what was available from factory on the router.
I picked Python for when I needed to scrape a Romanian phone book (to win an argument on the internet about something completely unrelated to programming). I once tried doing parallel programming and threads, it did not work out very well and I switched to some other language before I got too deep into it.
My guilty pleasure is the voodoo magic of C. I don’t really have a use for it in my job so I never get around to really do anything with it.
Lisp.
It just feels extremely natural to me, so it’s difficult to pinpoint specific features I like. But two such features stand out: the parantheses-based syntax and the extreme interactivity.
I haven’t done much with it at all but Dart felt nice while I was using it.
Out of the ones I use often prob C#.
No one else said it… I like Java, and more than the language all the tools available around it. They have been adding to the language to cut down on the traditional verboseness, and it can even natively compile now** some of the time.
The tools are also great, with Springboot for web services and jOOQ for databases, you can very quickly have a web app with strong typed database objects.
matlab 😈 because I love figuring out how to vectorize code! I’ve used it for various art projects (see below) and it manipulates images beautifully. and the documentation and error messages are easy to follow.
I try to stay language agnostic but if I’m honest JavaScript is my favorite because of the speed it provides. Also I like to build we based things so it’s always in the stack
i like nix, but it hasn’t clicked
Where’s the love for VBScript?!
I wrote VBScript for about 7 or 8 years professionally, starting in 2010. I don’t miss it.
I started in 2019 and write almost exclusively VBScript. It might be a bit limuted in some ways, but it’s quite useful in other ways. And it’s easy to learn!
Ease of learning is about all it has going for it these days. There are many many languages that are as easy to learn, but much more powerful and, frankly, useful.
Right here, will spend way to long writing a vba macro when i could have done it without quicker 😂
In 2008. (The year PowerShell 2.0 came out)
Haskel, It’s kind of hard to do some stuff which are easy in other languages but if you find a good problem to solve with it, it’s amazing how expressive you can be and how short your code gets compared to all the boilerplate code you have to write with other languages.
R. The Rstudio ide is awesome and the data wrangling packages are unmatched. It’s also pretty fast as long as your dataset fits in your RAM.
I haven’t programmed anything for years and it was all self learned so I’ll always have a soft spot for delphi.
Clojure. I not only get to use a functional language but also get to use all the libraries written for an actually popular language (Java, or JS for ClojureScript). Altough I’d choose something else if functional programming should ever catch on.
