Programming Question

[Shining_Finger]

What is your Favorite Programminf Language and Why? Why would or wouldn't you recommend this? What is some bad side to it?

[vorlon13]

Worst:

SNOBOL


Best:

I used to be pretty good at FOCAL, but that was 25 years ago, I'm not likely to ever get as good at it as I was.

[Jackalope]

"Favorite" would depend entirely on the requirements for the project. There are things I wouldn't use anything but C for, but for a great many use cases, it's the last thing I would choose.

Dirty trade secret: every language sucks.

[bennyboy]

c is the default "favorite" because it's what you'll use for any new hardware projects if you join a startup team or something.

The one I most enjoy is probably C#.NET, because Lists and .NET data controls and access to legacy .dlls let me do things fast. For example, I wanted to record a list of sounds for an English phonics course. So I threw a couple of buttons on a window, imported a legacy (almost back to DOS I think) sound library, used Visual Studio's built-in Sql object to quickly access my database, set up a navigator control to move through the words.

A little elbow grease, and I got each word to start recording on a sound threshold, and to truncate 250ms before each mouse-click. Then I used a .bat command to auto-run an Audacity chain to process all my sound files and resave them as .mp3 files.

Total time from conception to uploadable recordings of about 120 phonics sounds and about 400 words, properly truncated, noise-reduced and EQ-ed: 1 day. If I tried doing that in c, I'd still be looking for memory leaks, 1-off errors, etc.

[Ramy]

C# is my favorire language, although I'm not using it. A good language should have dynamic binding. Languages that force you to downcast pointers in order to use the correct method implementations are not smart, they don't allow to produce reusable code. Basically it's like an enhanced version of Java, that also allows you to overload operators and to write lambda functions. Also the fact that there are a lot of useful libraries adds an extra point to C#. If I had to write portable code I'd use C++.

[Alex K]

Favourite is still C++
I'm old fashioned, never got round to learning Python, but maybe I will, soon. I don't think I will do anything sharp

Weirdest I've used: O'Caml

[StuW]

Favorite would be Python due to how simple to learn yet powerful, downside would be the fact it's interpreted so not the fastest.

[robvalue]

I've learnt a bit of C a while back, but for messing about I like Small Basic. It's limited in a lot of ways, but can do quite cool stuff quickly.

[Tiberius]

Python for any small project you need to crank out in a few minutes, or for small automated tasks.

CakePHP if you want to get a complicated website running pretty quickly.

Java if you need your program to be compiled and also run on any OS without having to fuck around.