Rust by a big margin.
That thing is rock solid, it’s nearly magical.
Oddly enough Java. If you weren’t brainwashed to write the “enterprise Java”, it’s surprisingly succinct. More so than Go, whose forced “simplicity” ended up making it more verbose.
How do you feel about Kotlin?
I fucking love Kotlin.
Access to the massive Java ecosystem, and takes away 99% of the boilerplate that everybody loves to hate. AND introduces Optional types to make Null-management better. AND smart, type-aware hinting in the editor so that if you’ve validated once that x is not null, you won’t get warnings downstream - unless your variable could be altered by another thread, which is an important thing to know.
Kotlin is Java with all the suck taken out.
…And the Kotlin compiler is compatible with Java, so you can migrate one file at a time or just try it out in a subsection of your codebase…
It’s just… chef’s kiss
Same here. Java has a great ecosystem of tools too.
Typescript. Its pretty good and feature compleate overall, but has by far the most flexible typesystem.
It has by far the most broken type system which is basically a facade for the programmer to feel safe
Yes, the fact that we can mutate lists with anything is super scary: Here is a basic example.
On one hand, this is definitely a gap, on the other hand, you are very unlikely to run into it in practice.
The whole “pass an array/object into some function that will mutate it for you” pattern is not very popular in JS , you are much more likely to encounter code that just gives you a new array as a return value and treats its arguments as read-only.
If you validate your data at the boundaries where it enters your system (e.g. incoming JSON from HTTP responses), TypeScript is plenty good enough for almost all practical uses.
That depends on the job I want to do. But generally my selection is something like this.
- Is it a short simple script: Bash
- Longer script, then a more competent dynamic language like Perl/Python.
- Backend, a strong typed compiled language, with as few runtime errors as possible. If it depends on some particular API, the language with good enough bindings.
Preferred backend language, Rust, since that have the least runtime errors, thanks to its strong typing and the great error handling. But I also use Go if it have better libs for what I do, or Java for situations where that is more suitable.
Clojure. It’s just fun to write.
Firstly, it’s functional and “Lispy”. My code is super expressive. Writing code is like writing prose where I can choose a word (function) from a large vocabulary [1]. I can focus on high-level concepts and modifying states instead of fighting with low-level logic.
Secondly, it runs on JVM - an already robust and performant platform.
And there are so many good things that I cannot simply write in some words. The father of Clojure, Rich Hickey, is a genius in expressing Clojure’s design. You should check out some of his talks [2].
Too bad that Clojure is too “niche” that I haven’t got a chance to make a living by writing Clojure, yet. But learning it is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my career. Yes, it’s that good.
I’ll just say it: PHP. I mean the language itself is not really pretty (but came a long way).
But I’ve got a nice side gig running where I help small businesses and schools to keep their old PHP based websites running and secure until they can afford a new system. In that area money is often very tight and there are no “content managers” but a few people maintaining content with next to no technological knowledge and in their spare time. So changing systems is a hard task. Being the really decently priced guy who keeps their PHP ship afloat is pretty rewarding (not really monetarily but personally).
So working with PHP I have a very nice group of customers who are grateful for every bit of help. I love that.
C#. Comes with a first-class dev and debugging experience, a HUGE first-party BCL, cross-platform application support, and one of the best webserver frameworks out there.
TypeScript makes a reasonably-close second, not necessarily because it’s great, but because of how effective it is at making JavaScript usable.
The first-class dev and debugging experience, is this with Visual Studio or Rider as IDEs?
Because I currently do C# with Linux + neovim + Omnisharp as Language Server and it is really slow and bad. Do you have any tips?
VS for me. I’ve heard notbing but praise for Rider.
I know there’s also a lot of popularity for VSCode, if you know what you’re doing and what all extensions you need to setup, but that makes for a much bigger barrier to entry.
Whatever gets the job done 🤷♂️
Though you give me pain and suffering, C you will always be my beloved.
Better question: What is your favourite tool for a given problem?
Python for quick hacks to get the data you have in the format you want or something else that’s relatively simple.
JavaScript is basically Python’s use case but for websites (small games, forms, single page website).
I like C# for when you need to build out a big project carefully that also needs to run kinda quickly.
TypeScript for sacrificing run time to gain development speed. Also my main choice for the web. Wins against JS except for small things on the web.
Rust for when you gotta go fast and that takes all priority.
HTML
Python, for when I don’t feel like writing in Rust.
I didn’t have an answer for a very long time. Or more seriously, the answer was “the one that paid the most”. I’ve run the gamut of popular languages, C, C++, Java, Javascript, perl, ruby, Python, Visual Basic, VB.Net, C# and F#.
But the last couple years it’s really been C#. The pace of development on the language/runtime has really picked up with yearly releases. The features that are added and iterated on are expressive and intuitive. You can tell from the discussion posts on how a feature is being considered for inclusion is thoughtful and deliberate. It really feels like the language is in good hands.
Just wish those hands weren’t Microsoft.
PHP! Super easy in use, allows for very fast deployment, is secure, and there are boat loads of libraries available
Scala 😀
Had to scroll far to find this. Love Scala!
