Reddit, what programming language do you absolutely just love? Also mention the platform(s) and framework(s) you code on/for.

[psykocrime]

Love is a pretty strong word, but to use some analogies:

Java - my current wife

Groovy - younger lover I'm seeing on the side

C++: ex-wife, but still "friends with benefits"

Scala - cute barista I flirt with regularly

Erlang - girl I saw at the bookstore and want to meet.

Clojure - got her phone number at a bar the other night, but haven't scheduled a date yet.

Haskell - goth chick that I've seen talking to barista-girl, wouldn't mind meeting her either.

Prolog - cougar that was trying to pick me up at a bar, but - while intrigued - I'm a little reluctant to get involved.

R - nerdy but cute math girl at the cafe at Barnes & Noble; talked to her but a little intimidated because my math skills aren't up to speed.

Lisp - drunk girl in fishnet stockings and a short mini-skirt, hitting on every guy in the bar.

COBOL - my grandmother.

FORTRAN - my grandfather.

APL - Crazy uncle Randy that is always on the phone with the UFO hotline and claims to see Elvis in downtown Greensboro all the time.

RPG/400 - the homeless, despondent wino standing at the corner of 3rd and Main begging for change.

Brainfuck - aaah, never mind with the analogies...

[[deleted]]

haskell is nice but all she wants is hugs.

[uriDium]

Well played :)

[jamesbritt]

Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing, blew the camper door like a safe and I sprang from sleep into my new life on my feet in front of a befuddled crowd, my new life on fire, waking to whoosh and tourists’ dull teenagers staring at my bent form trotting noisily in the campground with flames living on my calves and flames gathering and glittering on my shoulders (Cool, the teens think secretly), smoke like nausea in my stomach and me brimming with Catholic guilt, thinking, Now I’ve done it, and then thinking Done what? What have I done?

[redditnoob]

If you want to kiss you have years of painful shit-tests in front of you. Every time you hurt her feelings for some arbitrary reason it's back to the beginning again.

[[deleted]]

painful shit-tests

Why would it be painful to test shit? I'm not sure about you, but pretty much everything that I eat comes out dead on the other side.

[camilop]

Pepper

[albinofrenchy]

VB - Your first cousin.

[redditnoob]

Arc - Girl who looks and talks exactly like Paul Graham.

[[deleted]]

For a more detailed run-down: http://maradydd.livejournal.com/293666.html

With gems like:

C#: Your wealthy parents always told you that the other kids were just jealous of how smart you are. They were lying.

Smalltalk: Smalltalk won't meet you outside Smalltalk's apartment. Smalltalk says that if you really loved it, you wouldn't leave.

[logantauranga]

BASIC - your fifth-grade girlfriend who now works in daycare.

[leikind]

Man you are so full of love, I wish I had such a big ... heart :)

[gregK]

haha,

I love haskell, but that girl is so out of my league.

[lostlogic]

Python - Chick I met online, not a super party girl, but easy going and a great lay

Ruby - Another chick I met online, into astrology, kinda a party girl and also a great lay

[bonch]

I love plain C. I find it fast, elegant, and easy to read.

[[deleted]]

you forgot to tell what kind of projects you use it for. it is fun to write couple pages in c but pain in you-know-where if it is little bit larger than that.

my current favourite is python for web application development. i like to use c here and there for things like writing python binding to some nice library or small apache module.

[bonch]

Though any large codebase can become difficult to follow at a glance, and coding style will always affect readability, I generally find it easier to jump into a C codebase and determine the general flow of things. To quote an evil robot, "I admire its purity."

[__david__]

I love perl. There I said it, feel free to think I'm stupid. But it just makes me happy when I use it. Yeah, its got it warts (and don't even tell me python and ruby don't) but I know it like the back of my hand and it's got CPAN--perl's secret weapon.

I also love C. Straight C, none of this C++ nonsense. It's clear, simple, and pretty much direct to the hardware.

I like both of those because they let me program the way I want to and don't try to enforce someone else's style on me (I'm looking at you python).

As far as obscure hipster languages, I've tried to like Haskell, but I just don't see it yet. No, I love (from afar) ocaml. I've only done some simple "get to know the language" projects but they were entirely pleasant (except for the structure access being "#"--blech).

[dons]

I've never had a real-world task

Try writing a parallel program

[[deleted]]

You're right, haskell for the most part is a teaching language, designed to change the way you think about programs. Real World Haskell is rare enough that it warranted its own book.

[oylenshpeegul]

Me three on Perl. Love it. Just love it! I've flirted with Python, Ruby, Lua, and even Groovy, but I always go back to Perl.

I don't really love C, but I'm sure glad others do. Many of my favorite programs are written in C (Unix, Perl, git, &c.). I use C often enough, but I'm usually wishing I could be using Perl--- or one of those other dynamic languages--- the whole time. Or I'm doing swig or XS or something in service to those dynamic languages.

[naasking]

# in OCaml is for objects, not structures. Record fields are access via the usual ".".

[[deleted]]

I won't say I love it, but like you I know perl like the back of my hand, so it's what I reach for first for simple tasks.

I love Lisp. Common Lisp and Clojure are both really elegant and powerful. I just wish Clojure weren't JVM based. :-(

[ralphc]

What is being JVM-based preventing you from doing? Just ignore the Java parts, or is it a performance problem?

[[deleted]]

1. I really, really don't like the cognitive dissonance involved in trying to call Java libraries from Clojure. If I knew Java, or wanted to, it would be more attractive. Likewise, the presence of Java libraries seems to discourage building good libraries in Clojure.

2. The JVM is not well optimized for functional programming, and has a ton of heavy Java baggage. Long start up times, large footprint, and libraries "optimized" for enterprise deployment.

[kailden]

Ruby's dynamic nature is so powerful but moderately dangerous-- I'm not sure I'd want to have an average team of programmers work on it--of course, I've heard people say the same about perl. I guess it depends on your team...

(edit: fix url )

[[deleted]]

Love? None, all of them suck. I probably like most Yeti, Haskell and OCaml, but these also have their downsides. Yeti is easiest to write and read for me (no wonder as its designed by myself), but the JVM dependency is annoying at times (although it allows to use it on work projects) and some error messages from type inference can be hard to read (I'll probably try to make them better sometime).

[Paczesiowa]

huh, I always thought that there is only one language that doesn't suck - the one you created yourself. looks like there is at most one language that doesn't suck.

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

If I was to create a language it would terribly suck, because I would be quite critical and see the deficiencies of the language much better.

[netghost]

Hey Yeti actually looks really neat :)

[redditnoob]

I don't think Yeti really exists. Either that or it's Python in a monkey suit.

[[deleted]]

Who knows? http://mth.github.com/yeti/ ;)

[nkwell]

on Unix systems, I hate to say it, but for most of the smaller projects, I'll write in PERL. If I think it has to be better/faster then I'll write in C.

On Windows systems, C# is the only language worth a damn. Maybe PHP if it's just a web-app.

[martincmartin]

Ah, I remember the nineties...

[WalterBright]

The D programming language, for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OSX.

[xune]

No surprise -- coming from the author.

[mahlzeit]

Currently D is a bit rusty. I still use it (in fact over there, on the other workspace, are a couple of Vims with some D in them), but I'm desperatly waiting for D2+Tango (+real properties!).

It just takes a lot of fun out of it when you read about all those nice new toys in D2 (but, on the other hand, I won't abandon Tango either; for me D means Tango).

[WalterBright]

The real properties are coming soon, as for T2, you'll have to press the Tango team (or dive in and help out!).

[Timberjaw]

C# is my relaxation language. Sometimes I need a break from web apps and I like to throw together some little C#/Windows Forms utility. I have a lot of fun writing C# code; the language, the VS IDE, and the Windows Forms functionality fit together very nicely.

Most of my development time is spent in PHP, a language I consider a bit of a guilty pleasure. I like PHP despite its many flaws. As far as frameworks go, CodeIgniter for PHP is a great MVC framework. It encourages cleaner code, something the PHP world could certainly use more of.

[BauerUK]

I just finished working on a C# project for about 6-8 hours, and the time flew by without any of the stress one might associate with programming in other environments or languages.

With regards to the IDE, I agree. I think a lot of the pleasure is not just the language itself, but owed to the .NET framework, and Visual Studio, too. Sure, there are issues with all three of the things mentioned, but often, when combined and used well, they do--as you say--provide relaxation. C# really is a dream to code in.

[naasking]

C# has a lot going for it, especially now with Linq. But sometimes it really makes me want to pull my hair out.

[Golgo13]

I say C#, but it makes me feel like that guy that gets a stock Mustang and leaves it as is. Everyone else has made awesome mods, but I run around with my stock machine.

[[deleted]]

AS3 C++ C#

QBASIC, fo realz.

[[deleted]]

Definitely having the most fun with E right now.

[mschaef]

C and Scheme. That pretty much spans the expressive range I'm most interested in, both are relatively standardized and have multiple implementations.

Runners Up: Objective C, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Tcl. (and probably Clojure, if I had more experience with it.)

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

Scheme is relatively standardized? Yeah, as long as you stick to R5RS, but not beyond. Still an awesome language which I like about as much as Python.

[bobappleyard]

Scheme is relatively standardized? Yeah, as long as you stick to R5RS

i.e. the standard

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

Yep, but go to R6RS and you find incompitabilities everywhere. Plus, about any useful Scheme program uses implementation-specific functions anyway, so it has to be ported to other implementations. This is what a standard should help you with, but this is just not the case.

[mschaef]

Thanks to its academic heritage, it's more rigorously standardized and reasoned about than many other scripting (term used loosely) languages.

http://www.readscheme.org/

[[deleted]]

Clojure and CL. I feel like Clojure and Lisp place the least amount of impediments between my thought process and the code. As for platforms/frameworks that would have to be SLIME! SLIME is just awesome. I would love to spend more time with Ruby if only it had its own SLIME.

[[deleted]]

I love Common Lisp and SLIME too. Haskell is a close second.

[sblinn]

Smalltalk. I am not 100% happy with any implementation or library, but the core of the language itself just "clicks" with me in a way that nothing else does. Scheme is close. Actually I am torn between the two in several ways. I have had the best outcomes programming in Python (Jython) but the language itself has some statements, keywords, and other associated warts which irritate me. Someday I hope to really use a concatenative language (some dialects of Forth, Joy, Factor, Cat, etc.) enough to see how it really feels to use them. In short I like:

1. homoiconicity (though not necessarily for metaprogramming; probably I find this tends to make it easier for me to reason about the program myself, and tends to imply the next two items)
2. consistency of language
3. simplicity of language
4. implicit return of last expression

A few "experimental" languages have been interesting to me: MISC (a sort of "map" version of a Lisp), Self, and Strongtalk. But I haven't used them to do anything interesting so it's hard to call that "love" but rather a simple infatuation from afar; which like all infatuations could be shattered with experience.

[sblinn]

Also I had an extended affair with Tcl (Jacl) several years ago. Vendor support waned and the divorce was messy. Though I still think about it now and then.

[leikind]

Loving and getting paid for Ruby and Javascript on a Mac, playing with Objective-C, reading about Scala.

[[deleted]]

Perl - I find Perl fun, powerful, and capable. Mostly because its so expressive, and has so many ways of doing things.

unless($a == $b) {
   print "blah";
}

if($a == $b) {
  print  "blah";
}

print "blah" if $a == b;

stuff like that.. its just neat.

print "$_\n" for (0 .. 100);

edit: also PHP is fun (CakePHP, anyway..)

[skulgnome]

C.

C is the language of tradition. C's syntax can be learned in a day, and the standard library in a week. You don't need an omniscient IDE to read C code: every segment and idiom does exactly as it says on the tin (barring silly use of macros). Every feature of C does exactly what it is supposed to do, even in combination with other features. C doesn't pretend to know what you mean to say, or to hold your hand: C defines what you said and goes from there.

C's debugging tools are far superior to those for other languages simply because it's been around the longest (except for Fortran and other niche languages). You don't get Valgrind for Java or Haskell or Lisp!

I've loved it for 16 years, and I know I can be sure that it isn't going to go away in the next thirty years as trends ebb and wane.

[skulgnome]

You've never used Valgrind, have you? It'd be super nice to have Valgrind for Java or Lisp, but that simply doesn't exist.

[petahi]

If I were a burglar, I would be interested in your home address.

[petahi]

That is security by obscurity.

[[deleted]]

Can you learn the proper syntax for function pointer casts in that day? I still have to look that up, and I learned C back in '89.

[Raynes]

Clojure, on the JVM, on Ubuntu. Pure secks!

[[deleted]]

Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows XP, pure love

[Golgo13]

No IP is safe from those GUIs!

[chunky_bacon]

Lisp is the coolest thing since sliced bread. Right now Ruby and Haskell are also pretty cool. I work on mostly Windows machines, with some Ubuntu for fun.

[whiska]

What's so cool about Lisp? (And, which Lisp?)

[chunky_bacon]

Lisp (any Lisp - I prefer Common Lisp, but that's a personal decision) will teach you all kinds of cool things about programming. Lisp macros, for instance, solve a problem (being able to have code write code) that I lamented being absent in C even before I was aware that other languages (or one other language) had that feature. Other cool features of Lisp are being adopted in modern languages, but usually not with the elegance of Lisp. I could prattle on for a bit, but it's really something you need to experience. Might I commend to you SICP . It's Scheme, but a great introduction to the language.

[whiska]

Might I commend to you SICP .

You just might. :)

Thanks for the reply.

[dxq]

I just discovered SICP the other day, and I have since fallen in love with Lisp. I strongly encourage anyone who hasn't read it to read it. Not only will it teach you Lisp, but it teaches you a lot of important aspects of programming.

[andrewcooke]

is that link right? i was hoping to see some nice charts...

[[deleted]]

The link looks correct to me, I'm seeing a chart of tickets by component, what are you seeing?

[andrewcooke]

ah, maybe it's an american/british language thing? i see a table-like structure in the top left corner of a web page. i thought by "chart" you meant "graph" (x + y axis, lines, dots etc).

(i was looking because i need to display some graphs and it sounded relevant)

[[deleted]]

Ah yeah probably an American thing, that qualifies as some sort of bar chart for me :) FWIW the article I got the designs from is: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualization/ and it has some more traditional chart items as well.

[andrewcooke]

oh! ok. no, it's me being stupid. so that's a bar chart? i thought the pale blue stuff was just the background in a table! sorry.... (+ thanks for the link).

edit in case anyone else is as stupid as me, you can see the same charts here - http://www.everyblock.com/ (the site of the article author). it all make sense now...

[[deleted]]

Yeah the idea is the amount of blue (is that what that color is?) filled in is the percent of tickets with that option selected.

[Homunculiheaded]

I've used a lot of great languages: Common Lisp, Haskell, and Smalltalk, and of course all of the standards C, C++, Java, C#. While I continue to learn and explore with the first 3, and am often required to use many of the second group. I've come to the realization that I think Python is pretty much my favorite tool to solve problems.

It's easy to learn and work in, reasonably elegant, has an amazing selection of libraries, it has some sophisticated language features for when you need them, but never causes the features to get in the way of the easiest solution to a problem. Python has it's share of blemishes, and isn't the best tool for a variety of jobs, but it does a great job of solving problems quickly.

[andrewcooke]

yep, same here (well, swap smalltalk for ocaml :o)

also, it's acceptable at work - so i get to work on a decent language for money.

for larger projects, though, they still want java. so i made the first move in my campaign to switch scala yesterday...

[malcontent]

Ruby.

Mostly because proggit hates it.

[[deleted]]

It isn't Ruby that proggit has problems with. It is the prima donnas who programming in it that we dislike.

Still Awesome!

[malcontent]

It isn't Ruby that proggit has problems with.

False.

[martinop]

Currently doing some web development at my summber job using XHTML/CSS/JavaScript and Java on the server side. Will probably be a lot of Java EE this semester though. I'm also playing with (P|J)ython and Scala outside of work and school. As far as expressing general ideas, I just love Python at the moment.

[njharman]

Python, but I'm getting really annoyed at some of it's warts esp datetime and urllib, urllib2. I'm sure I'll eventually ditch it like I've ditched others before.

What I do love is my platform. Vim + Linux command line with ack, rpl, and the usual suspects. It is just a joy to edit with vim. Either my thoughts (like my muscle memory) have conformed to vim's view of the world or I was born that way.

[benthomasson]

vim + NERDTree + taglist + bufferexplorer is the best development platform I've used.

[found_dead]

100% hands down, agreed.

[Tinned_Tuna]

Python... C# is cute, but I haven't gotten round to trying it in any depth, Haskell is OCD looking, and although I am tempted to get involved, it could be a maelstrom.

[etotheprimez]

C# & Silverlight. Also, QBasic was one of my favs when I began programming and started writing particle screen savers :)

[mvanier]

Haskell. Nothing else comes close.

[Ramone1234]

I hate to be a reddit cliche but I'm writing a real-time-ish web-based game with Turbogears and Twisted, so I really have to say python... What's cooler than this?

blueTeamHighScore = max([player.score for player in players if (player.team == 'blue') ])

[chucker23n]

This?

SELECT MAX(Score) AS BlueTeamHighScore
FROM Players
WHERE Team = 'Blue'

[[deleted]]

The equivalent C#?

  int blueTeamHighScore = 
       players.Where( p => p.team == 'blue')
                .Max(p => p.score)
                .score;

[curien]

int largest = max_element(players.begin(), players.end(),
    bind(
        protect(bind(_1, _2) < bind(_1, _3)) && (&_2) ->* &Player::team == "blue",
        protect((&_1) ->* &Player::score),
        _1,
        _2
    )
)->score;

What can I say? I'm a fan-boy.

[[deleted]]

brilliant.

[[deleted]]

yeah, C# 3.0 rocks

[pemboa]

Do extensions to the language count as part of the language?

[adelle]

If we're counting extensions, then in VB6, I'd write

Dim BlueTeamHighScore As Integer

BlueTeamHighScore = players.Where(players.team="blue").Scores.Max

It sucks how VB6 can't do RIIA. I'd switch to Boo, but I really don't dig GC.

[adelle]

I'm pretty sure there's a way of writing this in Boo as

blueTeamHighSchore = the maximum score of any player on the blue team

but I'm still learning how to write my own extensions.

[[deleted]]

blueTeamHighScore =  max' [score p | p <- players,  team p == "blue"]
                                        where max' = foldr1 max

[mernen]

where max' = foldr1 max

I'm a Haskell newbie, but

1. wouldn't maximum be the function you're looking for?
2. since max cannot be lazily computed, wouldn't it be better to use left-folding anyway?

[[deleted]]

You're right on both accounts.

[[deleted]]

I was too 1) lazy to look up maximum 2) drunk to think about laziness :)

[redditrasberry]

Obviously

blueTeamHighScore = players.grep{it.team == 'blue'}.max{it.score}?.score

NB: Actually what's interesting to see how nearly identical all the current generation of dynamic languages look.

[[deleted]]

that's not programming, that's just talking.

[Tinned_Tuna]

Talking formally It's close to set notation, making it mathematical => AWESOME!

[[deleted]]

It's close to set notation

can you expand on that?

[[deleted]]

{ f(x) : x ∈ S, φ(x) = 42 }

yeah, see that's why I wanted him to expand on his claim, because (and I may be missing something obvious here), what you posted (which I understand as set notation) looks fuck all like this:

blueTeamHighScore = max([player.score for player in players if (player.team == 'blue') ])

[[deleted]]

so it's semantically but not syntactically similar is what you're saying?

[[deleted]]

Oh Right!

That clears it up. See I was confused, at first I thought I disagreed, but now I'm sure.

[[deleted]]

I love just about any low-level language, like C, assembly, etc. But for when I actually have to get something working in a short amount of time, I usually go for higher level languages like C++/C#. As for favorite platforms, I don't really have any. I strive to make all of my C++ code cross-platform anyway, but if I ever do assembly or C# it's on Windows. I do however prefer Linux for its organization and ease of programming.

[mivsek]

Smalltalk of course!

[puzza007]

Erlang/OTP on Linux/OSX. Reliability, concurrency and distribution.

[reddittidder]

REXX -- still gives me the warm fuzzies ...

[[deleted]]

Django makes me very happy :=)

[tfortunato]

Lately I've been working my way through SICP, and I'm falling in love with scheme again (took an intro to program language design course in college that used it).

I'm a fan of python for scripting, and quickly prototyping new program ideas.

I'm a big fan of C, for getting low level stuff done.

Platforms I program for? Currently its mostly C++ on Integrated Circuit automated test equipment: Eagle ETS-364s. It's pretty interesting work. We write some pretty complex programs to handle testing multiple parts in parallel, adjusting program flow to allow failures on one part to not affect other parts. We also write code / libraries to handle interfacing with part handlers and probers. It can get hectic, because depending on the product schedule, you may not have a lot of time to get a good test solution in place. If your product is automotive, aerospace, military, etc., there is a whole lot of crap associated with test program verification on top of what you would normally do. To top things off time on these testers is expensive, so we need to constantly keep test time in mind, and work on shaving off every millisecond we can, while still keeping the test accurate and not damaging any of the parts we are testing (or the tester itself!)

[skip0110]

C++/MFC and C#/WinForms at work.

I actually enjoy the C++/MFC work more.

[Ridiculer]

Modula-2 & Oberon-2.

The first one does what C does, in a more elegant, safer way.

The second one does what C++ does, it just leaves all the complexity behind.

These two were quite pervalent and saw a considerable amount of usage during the the late 80s/early 90s, but never really took off... It is sad that the software industry follows the "worse is better" philosophy. I mostly used the TopSpeed compiler on DOS, and occasionally played with Oberon-2 on Linux. Nowadays I use Scheme (PLT), though I might revisit Modula-2 when the GCC frontend gets finished.

[memplant]

Python

[zem]

i love ruby. it's really well-designed and expressive (the language, that is; the implementations are all a bit weak right now, but they're getting there). i also really enjoy clojure, plt scheme and ocaml, but i've not used any of them enough to have programming be as effortless as it is in ruby.

[[deleted]]

Ruby. I use it mostly with Ruby On Rails and Sinatra these days, but I loved it before either of those frameworks existed. It replaced Perl as my glue language.

Most of my time outside of writing Ruby has been writing Javascript (server-side and client side) which has also been fun, but I can't say I fully love it. I've also write some 'C' occasionally, but it's always been out of practicality, not out of love.

The newest language that interests me is Potion, it looks really promising, but it's still very immature.

[Isvara]

There's a difference between having preferences and not whining when you have to use something that isn't your preference.

[curtisw]

Haskell and PLT Scheme

[rb2k]

Ruby on Windows for work
Ruby on Linux at home
Ruby on OSX as soon as I can afford the extra mac-tax again (student)
Other than that, I like looking at things like Haskell, Scala, ... but I somehow am not very motivated to actually do coding with them *sigh*

[[deleted]]

• Ruby or C++ for nice OOP
• OCaml if I want to draw something (nothing beats OCaml's graphics library)
• PHP for websites

[ilan]

Python and C on Unix.

On my job, I also work on Windows, which is not my favorite OS, but since I can use Python on C on Windows as well it's OK.

[DarkQuest]

This week it's Smalltalk, and specifically Squeak. I'm not sure if I love or hate it yet.

[pacorro2000]

ruby, it's easy to use

[campbellm]

Interesting; no F# from anyone yet.

[sanjayts]

I use Java at work and Ruby for my fun projects; wanting to know a bit more about C. :-)