Recently on hacker news there were surveys of their readers about their favorite programming language and their least favorite one, with interesting results. While I’m surprised that Java has a higher ratio of least liked to favorite than the horrible PHP, this raised another question: What’s my favorite programming language?
It’s difficult to answer, because to me most languages are not too bad. There are a few outliers that I dislike, like C++ and PHP, because they tend to promote bad software design practices. But otherwise, I can make just as beautiful code in Perl without object-oriented programming than in Python with mutating objects.
Overall, they all tend to be equally “meh”. Those with lower abstraction levels, like C, are more dangerous to simple bugs, while those with higher abstractions, like Scala and Python, can lead to inscrutable complex bugs. So it all balances out, and I don’t make a big deal out of it.
Published on March 29, 2012 at 17:23 EDT
Older post: One Week
Newer post: Animated Arts
