Poll: Best Programming Language

geekspeek · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:16 pm Post subject: Poll: Best Programming Language

Pick your fave programming language. If you choose "Something Not Listed", please post to indicate which language you prefer.

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John Galt · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:32 pm Post subject:

No such thing as "best". All languages have their purposes. You can't code a device driver in Visual Basic, just like you won't code a database in pure assembly.

I use a lot of languages, C, C++, Pascal/Delphi, PHP, Perl (I love this one), JavaScript, I know some assembly, and I'm learning Scheme. I consider Visual Basic and its variants to be a necessary evil rather than a useful thing, however.

ViPr · Gauss Rifle Trooper **Joined**: 30 Dec 2004

i just use C or C++ and it pisses me off that there are many languages. i don't get the point of there being various languages. plus i only know english for the same reason. well i admit it is kinda fun laughing at all the various accents but multi languages just causes problems. if people could just stop having to learn so many languages then they could devote more time to learning science so we would be living in space by now and all diseases would be curable so we could have sex with so many women without worrying.

John Galt · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 4:23 pm Post subject:

Cause every one of them is optimised to do something and do it well, as opposed to being a be-all-end-all ?
And because it is pretty impossible to mix multiple conflicting paradigms in one language (procedural/OOP vs functional , strong vs weak / static vs dynamic / safe vs unsafe / implicit vs explicit typing, multiple inheritance vs interfaces, the list goes on and on... ).
I would much rather have a handful of specialised languages for solving specific tasks than one megalanguage which tries to solve every possible problem.

Clazzy · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 4:53 pm Post subject:

DCoder is right, there are different languages because one wouldn't encompass everything. I may not actually know a great deal about programming (although I have the joy of learning C next year for physics) but I have picked up random bits of knowledge from using Linux. I keep hearing lots of people heralding C# as the new "in" language because of the possibility of cross-compatibility (i.e. with .NET on Windows and Mono on Linux/BSD/OSX/Solaris) and its ease (although I can't really give an opinion here). However, it seems to, overall, be far slower than C and C++ (which are, I believe, aimed more with speed and efficiency in mind) which in turn will be slower than Assembly. Assembly will be limited to specific processor architectures, making it only useful in certain situations. You could go around in circles like this for years, you just have to pick a language you like for the right situation.

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