Favorite Programming Language

[Nymus Anon]

What is your favorite programming language to use, if you know any? Is there any language you would suggest learning and why.

So far, I personally like c++. That's the language I started with.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

I don't think I would be able to speak of one language that is the favorite in general. It all depends on circumstances.


For general scripting, prototyping: Python
Statistics, machine learning, data analysis: R
High-performance code, heavy computations: C++


But if I would have to pick one, it would definitely be C++. To me it's a perfect combination of utility (provided by stl, abstraction mechanisms, etc), and performance.

 

[Haim]

C# from pure language view.
In term of frameworks AS3.

In a better world I would look into haxe, which has as3 frameworks and simplicity and the features of c#.

 

[Adamastor]

What is your favorite programming language to use, if you know any? Is there any language you would suggest learning and why.

So far, I personally like c++. That's the language I started with.

Suggest learning and why? Here's my biased view, about some common programming languages.

Different languages that will teach you different things. It's a really really long journey:

1. Python/Ruby
2. Java / C#
3. Clojure / Haskell / OCaml
4. C
5. Assembly

Easiest to be useful and do something meaningful is (1) Python/Ruby, IMHO. Maybe crawl some website? Do a dirty automation in your own PC? Write a beautiful site withouth drag'n drop (kinda)?

(2) Java / C# -> Learn about OO, be overwhelmed by lots of line of code, and business way of thinking of bloated abstractions over abstractions.

(3) Time for some functional programming. Tired of the bloat? Wanna write succinct or code that actually makes sense? Or rather beautiful code? These communities are full of enthusiasts.

(4) Do you actually know how your PC works like no? Wanna try living without garbage collection? Try doing some really specific things with your OS to (try to) understand how things works.

(5) Ho, now you know what a program actually looks like (these .elf / .exe files)? What are dynamic and static libraries? Wanna try how your CPU and Memory works like?


___

Disclaimer: Not the road I followed tho, neither in my spare time nor in my paid work time.

 

[Nymus Anon]

Hmm.
I have been considering python.
Are there any good website tutorials anyone could point me towards for learning python?

 

[Ex-User (8886)]

C++
Python

 

[Adamastor]

Hmm.
I have been considering python.
Are there any good website tutorials anyone could point me towards for learning python?

If you are into challenges, do a project, something that you want or need, less useful but good nonetheless: copy something.

Some ideas:

If you are into movies:
- A movie suggestion engine: Get data from IMDB, then input your favorite movies and movies you watched, fetch related movies with good rating that you didn't watch yet.
- Maybe a movie watchlist? A list of movies you watched and your reviews, and movies you wanna watch

If you are into books:
- Watch/Monitor amazon prices/deals. They are always changing, so write something that watches prices every hour or everyday of books in your wishlist and send you an email if there's a good deal. Or plot the prices changing overtime, so you can guess when is the best time to buy it.

If you are into cryptocurrencies:
- Learn how to extract data from blockchain. Information is public, no?
- Or monitor prices directly from the exchanges


Daily tasks automation:
- How about renaming all files in a directory? Maybe replacing all whitespaces with "-"?
- How about some image processing? Apply common filters to photos using some Python library.

___

If you are NOT into challenges and wanna learn the easy way, just the syntax and do nothing relevant or interesting. Online resources should be enough:

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
https://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Or look into some useful libraries like Matplotlib (draw plots easily) and scikit-learn and OpenCV (Follow a tutorial and write a face detection script)

 

[baccheion]

Nothing has ever topped C (with a few modifications).

 

[Bizzo]

I can tell you my least favorite ones.

1.)javascript 2.)Visual Basic 3.)PHP 4.)Java and C# tie 5.)Python. 6.)GMScript

Since Game Maker Script hardly qualifies as a language, I guess that makes Python my favorite.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

Nothing has ever topped C (with a few modifications).

I think knowing C is essential if one wants to write high-performance code. A lot of C++ programmers don't even know the difference between stack and heap memory because all the C++ tools work well enough for most purposes without knowing such things. On the other hand, it is quite annoying having to write, say, a hash map from scratch if you're only using pure C. So I say a combination of C and C++ is the real deal.

 

[Kuu]

In my limited experience I always found javascript somewhat annoying. Conversely I've been learning some C# recently which feels much nicer.

 

[Black Rose]

What is your favorite programming language

memes

 

[Chris11]

What is your favorite programming language to use, if you know any? Is there any language you would suggest learning and why.

So far, I personally like c++. That's the language I started with.

Personally, I use Python more than any other programming language; however, it is not my favorite. My favorite is Haskell because it is, if you learn it how it ought to be learned, just monoidal category theory, which appeals to me as I am a mathematician.

 

[scorpiomover]

RPG/400 (Report Program Generator).
If you come from a non-mainframe background (like me), it's really hard to get used to.
But once you write a few RPG programs and see them run on an AS/400, you'll wonder why you ever used any other language.
Then you realise that RPG and similar languages are only for mainframe-style machines, and then you understand why there are so many hundreds of languages for Windows/*nix/Mac personal computers.
Then you try to do on those languages what you saw in RPG.
Every time you try to imitate one aspect of RPG, everyone calls your code a work of genius.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

Assembly 4 life

Jokes aside though, I'm trying to learn assembly to write faster C++ code. Things like cache profiling tools as well.

 

[scorpiomover]

I think knowing C is essential if one wants to write high-performance code.

Assembly 4 life

Jokes aside though, I'm trying to learn assembly to write faster C++ code. Things like cache profiling tools as well.

Not a bad idea.

I once came across a screen saver that was written in assembler. The guy who wrote it, wrote it originally in C, and then decided to re-write it in assembler. He wrote that it ran at about 10 times the speed of the C version, and that you could expect the same kinds of performance increases if you write anything in assembler.

But then, you're effectively writing the compiled code yourself. So you can really optimise it well, or screw it up.

 

[BurnedOut]

Python's my primary language.

Apart from that, I really liked Perl.

ES2020 also seems nice to me. It has a lot of functions for lists and dictionaries. I have not used it much but it seems like a good complement to Python.

When it comes to shell-scripting, I think that powershell is unbeatable. But that's an unrealistic comparison with bash. I use zsh in place of zsh because it is more convenient regarding its array ops and simply more functionality which I wouldn't expect in bash.

Apart from primarily using Python, Perl, I have tried Lua but it requires a lot of boilerplate code. I usually stay away from statically typed languages. However, the one I really liked is golang.

 

[XyzyX]

My favourite was ActionScript/Flash since it was actually a programming language fused with a drawing & animation program, it's too sad it disappeared since everyone had so much fun with it...

Otherwise i like matlab/octave and java for the swift jetbrains IDE, but mostly i code C++, the most useful language...