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Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

• Kilimanjaro 15y ago
  Top ten 24 hours later out of 11689 votes Python 2591 22.17% Ruby 1451 12.41% JavaScript 1182 10.11% C 817 6.99% C# 678 5.80% PHP 544 4.65% Java 460 3.94% Haskell 450 3.85% C++ 449 3.84% Clojure 388 3.32%
• untog 15y ago
  I find it difficult to divorce 'favourite language' from 'favourite stack'. I use C# a lot, and I love it. But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) so recently I've switched to using node.js and CoffeeScript in my projects. It's fantastic. So right now my favourite language is JavaScript/CoffeeScript, but just because of the things I can do with it.
  • endlessvoid94 15y ago
    > just because of the things I can do with it I am hard pressed to find a better reason to like a language or stack.
    • untog 15y ago
      Well, I was thinking that it's possible to like a language in a very pure, abstract way- C# is a great example of that. Lambdas, LINQ, anonymous functions... it's a slick, slick language. If I'm looking at language alone, it's probably my favourite. But I can't do anywhere near as much with it.
    • tomjen3 15y ago
      I love Haskells purity -- simply because it is so audacious and so different from everything else. I love Lisps and how it made meta programming first class even though I will never be in a position to use it in my day to day work.
  • dpritchett 15y ago
    I love the Python ecosystem but I prefer Coffeescript as a language. Guess I'll upvote both.
  • reitzensteinm 15y ago
    I agree. I'm not especially fond of the Haxe language, but it's Good Enough that I'm happy using it day to day. However, its ability to export to so many different targets (C++, Javascript [+ Node.js], Java in beta I believe, Flash SWF, AS3, Tamarin, PHP etc) is a real killer feature. Would that count towards this poll or not?
    • astrofinch 15y ago
      Which targets are you using? Wouldn't be awkward to use Haxe for a project that employed language specific APIs? It seems like the sweet spot would be using it to write basic libraries that had no external dependencies.
      • reitzensteinm 15y ago
        C++, Flash, and Tamarin and Neko experimentally. Platform specific APIs are awkward, which is why it's mainly used for writing games. NekoNME abstracts most of that away. I'm not so sure how easily it does node.js. But the standard runtime for Haxe has been ported to the other languages in a fairly bulletproof way.
        • astrofinch 15y ago
          So the end result is being able to make games that run in the browser and on the desktop from the same source code? Any other reason why someone might want to use it?
  • MartinCron 15y ago
    But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC is much, much less heavy than the original ASP.NET (if that's what you're referring to). This is especially the case if you use the Razor syntax for your views.
    • bad_user 15y ago
      Being a little offtopic, but I have a personal pet peeve with ASP.NET MVC ... since they bothered to release it as open-source, why are they keeping Razor as a binary blob? Shit, why are they keeping ASP.NET itself as closed source? This is something that always bothered me about Microsoft-related stuff. Right now I'm using Python and Django for web development. I'm also using Ruby on Rails for a side project. Having access to the source code is vital for me as I've become accustomed to reading a lot of source code. And reading source-code for lack of better documentation is sweet, but then I went further and for instance I also copy/pasted a lot of snippets straight from Django's source code, or worked-around bugs by patching components. That's why I consider open-source to be superior, regardless of all the polish that Microsoft is able to apply to their products. I'm a software developer, not your average user. Just as a sports-car racer would find unacceptable the lack of access to the internals of her own car, I find unacceptable the lack of source-code that I can read, modify and distribute.
      • MartinCron 15y ago
        That hasn't been a problem for me personally, but I see where you're coming from. For pure debugging purposes, have you tried using a decompiler? For reasonably well-written (and not obfuscated, naturally) code, the decompiler output is remarkably clear.
      • pjmlp 15y ago
        While Microsoft could be more open source friendly, in the enterprise world I work on, I would consider Microsoft one of the good guys when compared with some of the other companies.
    • untog 15y ago
      Oh, I know, and it is much better. But the whole stack is still heavy- compare setting up an ASP.NET MVC site and IIS to node.js's "http.createServer()". There's no comparison.
  • meow 15y ago
    You should try NancyFx (https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy) some time. Its a light weight web framework. Simple and beautiful.
    • eropple 15y ago
      NancyFx is pretty cool. I'm not thrilled with Mono's performance as a server app, however (and I wouldn't bother with a Windows server). I should note, though, that the GC seems a little questionable, though 2.11.0 apparently has made SGen production-ready so I need to look at that again.
  • thehotelambush 15y ago
    What the fuck is a stack?
• cliftonk 15y ago
  My favorites: - Ruby for an imperative scripting language - Go for an imperative systems language (previously C) - Clojure as a functional language
  • djacobs 15y ago
    Although most Rails devs code Ruby in a strikingly imperative way, those of us who did Ruby long before Rails tend to code it in a functional way.
• uolot 15y ago
  I finally created an account because of this :) Python FTW!
  • adnam 15y ago
    Good choice. Welcome :)
    • uolot 15y ago
      nice to become a legal part of this awesome community :)
  • andybak 15y ago
    How sad - down-voted to oblivion on your first comment. Quick tip to get the appropriate tone right. Don't post anything that sounds like a typical Reddit comment.
    • uolot 15y ago
      maybe some day I will finally become reddit user :D
      • georgemcbay 15y ago
        So brave! (Don't worry, I have a ton of karma to burn here)
• postfuturist 15y ago
  Looks like 'Go' is missing, 'Lisp' should probably be 'Common Lisp' since Scheme and Clojure are also 'Lisp'.
  • btipling 15y ago
    I would have voted for Go. Agree, should be on the list.
    • fcambus 15y ago
      Agreed, same here. Go gets my love these days!
    • buro9 15y ago
      Same here, golang is my day to day language of choice now. The very large project I've just started I've selected Go! for.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  • drbawb 15y ago
    Same here. Also obligatory #golang so people can search for it on the page! (Had to sift through every "x hours a<go> to find this thread.)
• tomjen3 15y ago
  None. I like Lisp but it has its problem. I don't like Java but it is useful and it has good tools and a ton of libraries. I like C, but it needs better libraries and it can be a little cumbersome to write. I don't like C++, but there are cases where one of its features are useful. I hate PHP but it is easy to write a quick backend in which can be deployed everywhere. I hate Javascript, but it is hard to beat it in the browser. I summary I don't have a favorite language, they all kinda suck and kinda don't. It all depends on what I need to use them for.
  • cgag 15y ago
    Sounds like you would like clojure.
    • tomjen3 15y ago
      No. I tried it but it fails in two ways: 1) all the libraries are it takes advantage of are written in Java and this doesn't fit the closure style of coding at all. 2) the available tools just suck. Sorry, but without autocompletion the time it takes to write something balloons way, way too high. I guess 2 would have been less of an issue 20 years ago -- back then most of the IDEs that we use today did exist -- but it is not 20 years ago. It is now.
      • kinleyd 15y ago
        Totally agree with you on 1). I found Clojure uses Java libraries even for the most basic stuff, and that forced you into unLisp like code. That is acceptable for Java folk, but when you want to stay closer to Lisp, that's a problem.
• mjcohenw 15y ago
  gawk
• vyrotek 15y ago
  The number of C# votes makes me very happy. When I originally signed up oh.. 1333 days ago it felt like I was the only .Net dev on the site. It was a huge deal for me to find other startups built on .Net back then. Now I discover them far more often. I think Microsoft must be doing something right. I blame Scott Gu.
  • udp 15y ago
    Yeah, isn't it great that more people are backing a proprietary, closed source, Windows-centric technology? (As a pre-emptive strike, Mono does not make .NET any more "open". If Mono was maintained and supported by the same people that design the language/APIs I might change my tune.)
    • r4vik 15y ago
      Well C# is a great language, that runs very well everywhere (thanks to mono). I wouldn't ever dream of using ASP.NET but C# as a language is pretty nice.
      • InclinedPlane 15y ago
        Asp.net MVC is fine. Webforms is a crime.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    • InclinedPlane 15y ago
      That's a pretty substantial downside to C# for sure but it doesn't stop it from being a fantastic language. I can only imagine how popular it would be if MS supported non-Windows VMs (technically the CLR) directly.
    • migueldeicaza 15y ago
      Yes, it does.
    • bunderbunder 15y ago
• noblethrasher 15y ago
  Perhaps a better question is “what is your most favored language?”. My favorite language is F# but my most favored language is C#. It’s like how a dog might favor a particular limb until the other fully heals.
  • tesseractive 15y ago
    I voted for Python, but I would have voted for F# if it had been in the list. A good mix of strong language design (the ML pieces, plus some of the bits like workflows) and pragmatic utility (all those .Net libraries and such). I code mostly in C# for employment reasons, but I do personal code in F# or Python, depending on what kind of tools I need access to.
• instakill 15y ago
  Go Team Ruby! But on a serious note, I wonder how many of those are < 2 years (I am) and were influenced by the Ruby community, a lot of which seemed to have hung around on HN for the same period of time.
• jonhohle 15y ago
  I chose Smalltalk, not because its a language I get to use every day, or have even used a lot, but it has influenced two of the languages I'm most productive in, and from it has sprung foundational technologies which nearly all developers (especially those who program VM targeted languages) have been able to take advantage of. It was one of the first languages I used which really introduced me to a completely different way of problem solving and thinking about the structure of a program. I know that language was probably Lisp/Scheme for a lot of people, but for me it was Smalltalk. Implementing control structures without language keywords!? Operators implemented using the same message passing techniques as any other method call!? Querying any instance for its implementation and documentation at runtime!?
• simonsarris 15y ago
  C# really feels like the most mature language that I've ever dealt with. Writing it feels clear, if something is wrong the debugger is very clear. The number of features that are there is incredible (especially post C# 2.0 when they added generics). Properties are delightful. How do you convert to a string? Convert.ToString(). How about an integer? Knowing only that one, it's what you'd expect! I also picked JavaScript because I am in a love affair with this weird little language. I also think it is one of the easiest languages to teach basic programming with (videos forthcoming). The amount of time it takes to whip up a five-cent program with javascript without even leaving my browser, heck without even leaving this tab is just astounding to me even after all these years. One thing I noticed though while writing this comment is that more than the language itself, the tools that I use while building things in the language are what really make them a pleasure to use. If I wasn't using Google Chrome's web developer tools I'd probably consider JavaScript to be a nightmarish corpse of a language that punishes the slightest of typos with a silent malicious grin, as code execution carries on as if A.blah = 5 and A.blsh = 5 were both equally worthy of existing to the JS compiler/interpreter. Only by the grace of tools is JS tame at all.
  • hackinthebochs 15y ago
    Definitely agree with you on C#. It feels like this is what a standard, mature, widespread language should be. There are other languages that are better for specific tasks, but for the general programming language, C# really hits the sweet spot in terms of features, expressability, readability, and environment. This is the language that Java should have been--could have been. Also, I dread getting asked on my next interview "whats the one thing you don't like about your favorite language". I honestly can't think of anything off the top of my head. Granted, I've come across things that were frustrating at various times, but they never stick in my mind. I think that's a testament to how well the language has evolved.
    • MartinCron 15y ago
      whats the one thing you don't like about your favorite language That's easy. So many hacker types dismiss you as some sort of weirdo for favoring anything that came from Microsoft.
• noduerme 15y ago
  3 votes for Shell script and none for Tcl? I guess every kind of insanity has its limits.
  • drostie 15y ago
    It is worth the observation that we can only really upvote the languages that we have used -- others simply aren't eligible for the 'favorite' moniker; even if we've seen a little code written in them, we haven't really felt them. So, like, JS was my second language. Ruby and Clojure have as yet proven impenetrable for me to learn, but I'm working on that. I have shell scripted and done plenty of PHP, Python, Matlab, and Java, and I learned Scheme when using SICP but I feel like I never have anything available when I'm writing in it -- I hear Haskell is much better at this. I have seen some Smalltalk and it looked very pretty, some C and I was able to trace through it but I felt nervous as hell. That's the extent of my education. My point is, out of this, the only stuff that I know well enough to choose my favorite is PHP, Python, Java, and JS. This poll cannot give a meaningful result for the question of "what languages are good?" without also asking everyone who responds: which languages have you written more than a hundred lines of code in? which have you read more than a hundred lines of code in? Then we could ask, "given those that have used X, how much has it been loved?" and get a measure of lovability.
• lawn 15y ago
  It's funny. Every time I use a new language, or go back to an old favourite, it becomes my favorite language for a time. Static typing? Wonderful error messages! Dynamic typing? It does what I want! Functional programming? This is the future of programming! Object-oriented programming? I can describe the world! Low level? My code is fast. High level? My code is *expressive. Is this normal or is it just me? Don't you come to like, or love, a new language? Every time I do something different I realize how good things could be. But this is just a case of "the grass is greener on the other side" I guess. I ended up voting for Perl as it feels the most fun language. But ask me again in a month and you might get a different answer.
  • bthomas 15y ago
    I'm the same way, though I feel like this flies in the face of reason. Switching to a less familiar language usually implies more headaches and less productivity, but the novelty makes it more enjoyable. Another example of how programming is oddly emotional.
    • sassafras 15y ago
      Nothing odd about it, IMHO. One of the things I think tech-oriented people consistently ignore is the role of emotion and the subconscious in decision making, even in what are nominally objective disciplines. Our conclusions may be based on reason, but then where do our hypotheses and inspirations come from?
      • daithiobroin 15y ago
        ... oh... that's just magic. i will intellectually dine on that for a week!
      • bthomas 15y ago
        Totally agree. More accurate phrasing would have been "another reminder of how..." Book recommendation: Thinking Fast and Slow by Dan Kahneman. Great overview of how those factors affect decision making.
• srj55 15y ago
  wow, lots of pyfans
• kirinan 15y ago
  I chose Java, but hackers shouldn't have a language that is their "favorite". They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job. I realize this may be an unrealistic task, but I try my best to do it. While I probably the best at coding Java(Quickest, and get the most done in it), I don't always use it because its not the best language for the job.
  • chimeracoder 15y ago
    > They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job. That's certainly a correct answer, but it's correct because it's almost tautological. 'The language that I like the most is the one that's best [for what I want to do]'. The issue is that, in this question, 'favorite' is a bit vague, and the task isn't specified. (This is why I have a problem choosing 'favorites'.) Despite that, in this situation, I interpret it to mean 'What [general-purpose] language has the best design?' Theoretically, a perfectly-designed language would be designed in such a way that it has an absolute advantage over all other languages for every type of task. Given that definition, it follows naturally that I would choose Lisp - it's actually not my strongest language, but even a novice Lisper can see that Lisp is both as minimal as possible and yet as powerful as possible . Since it's a shapeshifter of sorts, it can adapt itself perfectly to any setting. The drawbacks with Lisp (in my view) have nothing to do with the design of the language itself, but rather the environment. The libraries of languages like Perl and Python are much larger, by sheer fact that the community is larger. Lisp is cross-platform, but the installation (quicklisp aside) is still messier than Ruby's gem-based packaging or Python's eggs. And lastly, because most people don't learn functional programming as their first step, it's got a learning curve. But none of those are problems with the language itself - at least not the design of the language. (I'm assuming here that we're dealing with high-level languages - it wouldn't really make sense to compare x86 assembly to Python - if you're writing assembly, you probably have a very good reason, and Python isn't even on the table). So in the end, your answer to this all determines on how you interpret the question, so it's fun to see what the results are... just don't try and compare them directly - I think anybody who interpreted the question the way I did would probably choose Lisp, but it's clear from the comments that many other people interpret this a different way. (Thankfully HN is good at avoiding flamewars, but I'm sure everyone here has seen enough useless 'debate' of this same topic on other forums to understand why I mention it!)
• spitfire 15y ago
  Mathematica. But not because of the language - it has some warts. But because of the problems I'm working on when I choose Mathematica as a tool.
  • acoward 15y ago
    Nice try Stephen.
    • spitfire 15y ago
      What makes me really happy is when I'm working on something new. Particularly science. Some sort of new kind of science.
    • RegEx 15y ago
      FYI, canned reddit-esque responses don't go over too well here.
  • dkd903 15y ago
    What kind of problems. Could you elaborate a bit please?
• georgemcbay 15y ago
  No Go or haxe? Epic poll failure! Of the ones on the list, I'd say C# is my favorite language though I virtually never use it due to the practical and political problems that tie it to Microsoft.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
• dacracot 15y ago
  XSLT and PL/SQL
• colomon 15y ago
  Perl 6.
• hoytie 15y ago
  http://www.cobol.com/ http://www.cobol.com/
• Cieplak 15y ago
  Where is Arc?
• jimminy 15y ago
  Same post from 6 hours ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745084
• S_A_P 15y ago
  I primarily use c# but I dont know if it is my favorite because that is what I get paid to write code in or if its because I know C#, Objective-C, VB, SQL, and a bit of C++. Of those languages, C# feels the most feature rich and easy to read, while I find working with the Cocoa framework and Objective-C particularly enjoyable. The others I work with but find no particular enjoyment from.
• tob 15y ago
  you write any more 100 lines and cannot eXpress your idea clearly with diagrams charts is a crap.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• kromped 15y ago
  PyCon 2012
• tob 15y ago
  cause you don't have the ability to abstract things.
• jolohaga 15y ago
  Where's R?
  • MartinCron 15y ago
    On my keyboard, it's between E and T, if you use a different layout, then I can't help you.
  • ahi 15y ago
    R is a delightful environment hobbled by a hideous language.
• himu11 15y ago
  [url=http://www.toyotacar-bd.tk]toyota http://www.toyotacar-bd.tk]toyota yaris[/url]
• Limes102 15y ago
  PHP is nice... but if I could improve it, I'd like it to be not quite so loosely typed. I would like to specify the datatypes.
  • kijin 15y ago
    Every now and then, someone comes up with ideas to "improve" PHP. Some of those ideas are actually quite good. The only problem is that PHP is about as obsessed with backwards compatibility as Windows is. Good luck getting the devs to accept a feature that will break scripts written in PHP 3. (Yes, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but libraries like phpass actually do claim to work in PHP 3, 4, and 5 without modification.)
• protomyth 15y ago
  I selected Forth, but Postscript was a lot funner. I have always wanted to sit down and create a cross between the two. Perl for short scripts (just because of CPAN and always have Perl installed) and Objective-C is my main application language. I gotta admit I miss Occam but it is over 20 years since I did any programming in it. I am currently researching agent based languages as I still have some Telescript documentation and have always been fascinated by the concept.
• ExpiredLink 15y ago
  'None' is missing!
• queryly 15y ago
  C# is great, it is even better with the vs.net, I found it is easier to express what I want to do in c# syntax. ASP.net is fine too, you can choose not to use the server control approach which I think is the bad part of asp.net
• Macha 15y ago
  Given the audience on HN, it's not surprising to see Python and Ruby disproportionally upvoted. (For the record: 145 for Python, 114 for Ruby at the moment, next highest is C at 53). Coffeescript is also significantly overrepresented. It's currently on 34, beating C++ (29), and in the same region as C# and Java. What I am surprised at however is that C# and Java (37 and 35) are doing as well in this poll as they are. It seems that Java in particular is disliked here for it's heavy reliance on classes, classes everywhere, while C# is more approved of, but still disliked. Partially for the same reasons, but also for how Windows-centric it effectively is. I guess it shows that HN isn't as seperate from a typical subset from programmers as it appears from just reading articles that are upvoted, and reading comments. Personally, my favourite is Python, but between college and Android development, I've mostly been writing Java for the last few months. While I find that Android makes it less painful than applications using other big Java APIs (Swing for example), I'd still rather be writing Python. I also wonder how different the results of this poll would be from a similar poll asking "What language do you write in a daily basis?". I'd imagine Haskell and Coffeescript as the biggest losers in such a comparison, while I'd imagine that PHP would have the biggest gain.
  • anarchotroll 15y ago
    C#, the language, is not windows centric. The framework released by microsoft might be, but the language itself is decoupled from windows.
• cadr 15y ago
  Ok, who are the five people that said "Cobol"? Show yourselves! :)
• K2h 15y ago
  Putting my vote on perl was important enough for me to finally create an account here after lurking for a year or so. Still on perl 5
• zz-zz-zz 15y ago
  Groovy?
• jeremyarussell 15y ago
  I picked Python and Assembly. There was a day when C++ would have gotten the pick but not today. As for my reasons. Python, simple enough to explain why. I get to quickly make and test a program with a language that is well documented, comes with a tutorial that in my opinion was just as good at getting me into programming with Python as any other books I've found out there, and the growing libraries for AI based fields is very nice. Lately (doing the NLP class, and was using SimpleCV/OpenCV for another project.) I've grown to love it even more then before. As for why Assembly was my second runner up? One very simple, but hopefully thought provoking reason. Assembly Language was the absolute most simple yet complicated programming language I had ever dealt with, it taught me more about how and why computers do the things they do then anything else I learned about computers. (since I keep people's computers going as a living, it was extraordinarily helpful in making me a pro at fixing them.)
• LukaD 15y ago
  My favorites: - Ruby, because it's easy and straight forward with lot's of nice features - Python, because... I don't know. I just enjoy writing Python code :)
• zz-zz-zz 15y ago
  SQL is not really a programming language. PL/SQL is.
• nickmain 15y ago
  Prolog
  • nickmain 15y ago
    Voting me down for stating my preference ? Really ?
• exch 15y ago
  My choice would be Go.
• sbmassey 15y ago
  It depends what I'm trying to do. The question is like asking a carpenter what their favorite tool is. It'd be more enlightening to (somehow) ask what kinds of problems people apply each language to.
• 3pt14159 15y ago
  I love Ruby, but ultimately Python is my favorite. Ruby is consistent and cool, but I can do everything I want with Python and I can make it FAST as hell. Over the past week I've been moving some things into Cython and it has literally sped 200 times faster than Python which is 10 times faster than Ruby, and with a lot less memory overhead. Speed _does_ matter when the two languages are nearly the same in terms of development speed. Furthermore Python has more libraries and less wtf moments when looking at peoples code.
• why-el 15y ago
  I am interesting in knowing at what time exactly would people think they have experienced enough language exposure to decide on the favorite one. Like, my favorite now is C, because thats the one I know best, and I cant say that this wont change, since I am learning Ruby and it rocks.
• adambard 15y ago
  I see a lot of votes for python, but a disproportionately small representation of python fans in the comments. If you asked me a year ago, I'dve said python. But lately, I've been using Clojure for personal projects, and it's making python seem just... boring. (I get the same feeling when I write in Ruby too) The "one right way" paradigm is a great one, and the language is solid. The built-ins are top-notch, and while not exactly a functional language, it's certainly expressive enough. In my mind, it's probably the ideal general-purpose language. But lately, I feel like I use it for everything because it's "good enough" for everything -- without being "great" at anything. Point? I don't think I had one, sorry. I just thought I'd share that notion to see if it resonated.
  • drostie 15y ago
    If you don't mind my asking, as a Python person, how did you learn Clojure? I'm mostly programming in Python and JavaScript today, and I want to learn Clojure, but I keep seeing these very strange talks. I don't know how to articulate it, really. My best metaphor is, it feels a little like I wanted to go out and learn about Catholicism and they said, "oh, that's easy, we'll just have you sit in on a bunch of confessions and you'll figure it out in no time." People explain why they made certain language decisions and I (as yet) lack any of the background needed to know what the hell they're going on about.
    • adambard 15y ago
      4clojure.com was very helpful for me, as was this: http://jkkramer.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/clojure-python-side-by-side/ http://jkkramer.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/clojure-python-side...
      • drostie 15y ago
        Thanks! I don't know how to pay you back, but I shall try to pay it forward.
        • adambard 15y ago
• zmmmmm 15y ago
  It's slightly depressing when a poll about favorite languages has 30+ options and your choice isn't there :-( +1 Groovy!
• bfrog 15y ago
  Its really a mix of erlang and python at this point. I love erlang for its error handling and concurrency performance. I love python for its easy to read factor, libraries, and simplicity.
• paufernandez 15y ago
  Can you add Go please?
• Finbarr 15y ago
  It's a fairly circumstantial question. If I had to pick one language for the rest of my life and could be asked to build all manner of applications, I'd pick Java. Otherwise it's ruby all the way - it's fun to work with, but has limits.
  • zmmmmm 15y ago
    You really might enjoy Groovy. It's eerie how similar it is to Ruby and yet somehow it pulls off being nearly Java compatible at the source level (I know you won't believe that statement if you haven't tried it, at least I wouldn't). It really is a kind of 'have your cake and eat it too' kind of language.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
• ciderpunx 15y ago
  Perl becuase it does what I want. Haskell because it makes me do what I ought to do.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• mythrndr 15y ago
  Other: LPC
• RShackleford 15y ago
  Fuck Pyhton!
• mbel 15y ago
  SQL isn't really general purpose programming language, it's hard to call it `programming' language at all. It doesn't really feel comparable to the other ones. Also Lisps could be merged into single entry since all shell languages are one.
• egonschiele 15y ago
  If Coffeescript is on here, Moonscript should be added too: https://github.com/leafo/moonscript https://github.com/leafo/moonscript
• egonschiele 15y ago
  If Coffeescript is on here, Moonscript should be added too: https://github.com/leafo/moonscript https://github.com/leafo/moonscript
• dkd903 15y ago
  I Love C, PHP. I also worked on Python long back during GSOC but did not get a chance to work on Python projects later. And after I started working on frontend, I have been a sucker for Javascript ever since!
• tieTYT 15y ago
  AWK. When I get to use it, that is. It's not right for most problems, but when it is, it's a pleasure to use.
• Aloisius 15y ago
  I was not expecting Python to be getting near as many votes as Ruby. It is my favorite language simply because the pseudocode I write on whiteboards is basically Python. Strangely, it has been since well before I really started using it regularly.
  • fusiongyro 15y ago
    Python seems to have higher penetration outside career programmers. When I learned Ruby about a decade ago, there was this "Ruby shouldn't be your first language" sentiment. I think there's been progress on that front, but Python had an early lead.
  • evoxed 15y ago
    I'm not quite ready to cast my vote for Python, but this statement is so true. Basically all of my notes from planning stages as well as algorithms I'm looking at or working on... might as well already be in the interpreter.
  • InclinedPlane 15y ago
    Python is rapidly replacing ruby as the de facto scripting language for automation. It's also starting to replace Java as the language of choice for teaching programming and CS.
    • cicloid 15y ago
      With tools such as?
      • InclinedPlane 15y ago
        I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Are you claiming I'm wrong or do you want me to do a google search for you?
        • aaronblohowiak 15y ago
          A google search may not be as insightful as someone talking about a trend in popularity for a specific niche (automation.) I think the poster was just asking you to share specifics that helped form your opinion.
• daviddaviddavid 15y ago
  Prolog
• wmeyer 15y ago
  F# It's really fun to use; a bit like Python but with the benefit of static typing.
• jacktoole1 15y ago
  Moonscript (voted for Coffeescript and Lua). It's like Coffeescript for Lua instead of JavaScript, which is great of you need a fast and concise language to embed in another application (compiling the standard lua interpreter for a platform consists mostly of dragging the source to your IDE and compiling). ( http://moonscript.org/ http://moonscript.org/ ) I also love OCaml (and miss it's static inferred typing and pattern matching everywhere else), but it's ecosystem has never fit with what I'm working on outside of coursework in it.
• colanderman 15y ago
  Mercury (http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/ http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/), a strongly-typed, fast, relative of Prolog.
• headfonekid 15y ago
  I am verymuch surprised that there are over 2x JavaScript votes than Java or C++
• molex 15y ago
  Who are these masochists who are voting for C++?
  • mihaela 15y ago
    people who prefer compiled to interpreted
    • molex 15y ago
      I prefer compiled over interpreted...but I prefer almost anything over C++!
• joejohnson 15y ago
  Do people like Actionscript? I've always felt like this language is only used when programmers have no other choice.
• mindcrime 15y ago
  No Groovy? Seriously?!?? C'mon, man... Anyway, put me down for "Groovy" at the moment, although it could potentially be knocked off that perch at some point. I have some other languages I'm interested in exploring but haven't gotten deeply into yet.
• eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  The one I'm developing, duh.
• larsberg 15y ago
  Standard ML! Of course, I do research on Manticore (parallel dialect of Standard ML) and am one of the primary developers left on the SML/NJ implementation. So I'm a bit biased. But trying to be objective, the module system is absolutely amazing. It's a simple / small set of syntax with a formalized semantics that is powerful enough to do almost everything you want to do with generics, classes, macros, and other module systems.
  • fusiongyro 15y ago
    Bless you! Standard ML is the closest thing we have to a perfect language, in my opinion. My only wish would be a solution to the non-extensible overloading issue, but to fix it without also fixing the formal semantics around it feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is why I haven't gotten into Felix or Mythryl. I mostly use Haskell myself. I find myself missing the laziness and purity when I use Standard ML, but I think the biggest obstacle for me is the shortage of libraries. I'm happy to use a language without a community, but compared to Haskell it feels a bit like a ghost town. Such a shame, it really is fantastic and would have been the perfect tool for building huge systems on.
    • larsberg 15y ago
      Thanks! Yes, the overloading issue requires changes to both the parsing rules and some fairly tricky formal semantics changes as well. I've talked with Dave MacQueen about it in the past, and it didn't sound like something he was terribly averse to, just that it would take a long time to really get _right_. And then it places a burden on the SML implementations, though at this point that's really SML/NJ, MLton, and possibly Poly/ML (though I don't know that team very well yet). Unfortunately, the SML implementor community largely either moved on to other research projects after the implementation-y papers had been mined or left to work in finance (interestingly, it seems to be about 50/50, with the exception of a Googler or two). We don't really have anybody in research labs to do the kind of amazing full-time implementation, support, evangelism, and publication work that the Simons do so fabulously for Haskell! That said, as a researcher, having many more SML users would require us (particularly Manticore) to Get Real in ways that are not on the path to publication. And considering I'm already only going to have 7-ish publications when I graduate, I see a probable future locked behind the doors of Big Finance for myself as well...
• ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Mesa and/or Modula3 was always a nice language to write in.
• grnadav 15y ago
  Groovy
• sarbogast 15y ago
  It's really a shame that Groovy is not even in this list. It's understandable as it is very poorly marketed, but it is really a shame that it is not mentioned more, especially on such a forum. For entrepreneurs, it has so many advantages. As productive as Ruby and Python, and yet running on performant Java runtime. Plus, being a derivative of the Java language, it makes it so easy to find experimented developers. It's my personal favorite, and I really think all entrepreneurs with a Java background should give it a try.
  • zmmmmm 15y ago
    Yeah, Groovy really is an awesome all round language. Nearly all the benefits of Java, Python & Ruby rolled into one. And so easily embeddable into any Java app, you can use it just where you need it or everywhere. It benchmarks substantially faster than Python and Ruby for the things I do, and it's really easy to optimize by just dropping into Java for anything that is a bottleneck which is far better than dropping to C and losing the all the benefits of living in a VM.
  • ippisl 15y ago
    And don't forget groovy++ to easily achieve java like performance.
  • ippisl 15y ago
    And don't forget groovy++ to easily achieve java like performance.
• alanh 15y ago
  Love how much love CoffeeScript gets!
• ootachi 15y ago
  It changes all the time, and all languages have their merits and drawbacks. But I'd say Rust for now.
  • anacrolix 15y ago
    link me to some stuff you've written in it.
• ajuc 15y ago
  Python, because it lets me concentrate on what I want to do, and by default I think about algorithms in something that looks a lot like Python. Runner-ups: Clojure, because it's different and elegant. Javascript/java/c++ because sometimes it needs to work in browser/use some library/be fast.
• mathetic 15y ago
  It is quite surprising to see that Ruby and Python are the most criticized and also the most popular languages on HN.
• blktiger 15y ago
  I kind of wanted to vote for groovy. It's pretty much what you get if Java and Ruby had a baby and is a pleasant language to work with. Truthfully though, I like a lot of the languages on that list so it's hard to pick just one as a favorite.
• icaci 15y ago
  I'm surprised to see such a low number of Fortran programmers. Are we really at the brink of extinction or are people from science and engineering not interested in all this kool new (hacker) stuff?
• rnadna 15y ago
  R
• suyash 15y ago
  Surprised to see the poll includes coffee script amongst the list of these elite languages
• laconian 15y ago
  C# is my favorite language, too bad I can't use it since I work at a Linux shop.
• Rickasaurus 15y ago
  Where's F#?
• masklinn 15y ago
  No Self?
• gruuk 15y ago
  Perl, especially when parsing and manipulating text files. Still the best glue language between applications that don't like each other, such as when the output from one is incompatible with the input of the other (of course, vendor of second app promised it would be compatible). The only downside after perl saves the day is that it makes whoever decided to buy that application look far less bad than they deserve.
• elviejo 15y ago
  Eiffel
• nextparadigms 15y ago
  No Go?
• orblivion 15y ago
  Favorite language, not to be confused with a language I can practically use yet. I love and voted for Haskell but for now my weapon of choice is Python.
• jgmmo 15y ago
  What about Go?
• veyron 15y ago
  Why isn't `awk` on this list?
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• arjn 15y ago
  I moved from Java to Python, hopefully I will never have to go back. Writing in python is a pleasure. I do a lot of SQL too though I cant really say I like it.
• hk__2 15y ago
  I cannot understand why 180 people voted up PHP. It's the worth language I've ever tried.
• Tichy 15y ago
  The recent success of Python saddens me.
• swah 15y ago
  Those days I feel (unless you write backends for Google or embedded sw) that "Python is all you need" (unfortunately - I wish I could work with more languages with equal productivity).
• shadgregory 15y ago
  By voting for Scheme, I really mean Racket.
• mattbriggs 15y ago
  For me, there is a huge difference between programming languages I like, and what I can build with them. Clojure is my favourite, followed by Io. Both languages have a clean, minimalist aesthetic, are rediculesly powerful, and very expressive. When it comes to getting stuff done, Javascript is an interesting language, and there are some things about it I like a lot, but there are many things in it where a) there is syntax for things that make no sense (like the ~ operator), b) the syntax for something common and important is horribly clunky (like function, or assigning to a prototype), c) the syntax having odd rules that almost seem like little traps (like the way that () will call the previous line as a function, or how you need a trailing comma on everything in an object literal except for the last thing). All that being said, I love what I can do with it. And I really find that CSS/JS/Semantic HTML has some of the nicest seperation of concerns of any UI programming toolkit I have looked at. So when it comes to what I can build (and get paid to build), I would say my favorite language is javascript.
• ericmuyser 15y ago
  I just wish I could downvote. I'm looking at you, PHP.
  • prodigal_erik 15y ago
    Have to admit that seeing PHP 2:1 over Lisp casts the HN audience in a much different light, though Haskell's fairly good showing is at least a little reassuring.
    • Kiro 15y ago
      I prefer PHP to Lisp.
• ajdecon 15y ago
  Python for when I'm "thinking in code", or doing data analysis that's not too performance sensitive (NumPy). I probably enjoy Python the most. Ruby for when I'm doing configuration management or occasional webdev. Fortran for when I'm doing serious computation, C for when I'm trying to do something fast that isn't number-crunching. (Though I'm trying to learn Go for that.) And a smattering of other languages (Perl, shell, Java, etc) for interacting with tools that speak those better than anything else.
  • olalonde 15y ago
    I was under the impression that Python/Ruby were pretty much interchangeable. In what situations do you chose one over the other?
    • ajdecon 15y ago
      Well... they're both popular, dynamic, object-oriented programming languages with a clean syntax. But that doesn't make them interchangeable. ;-) In general I find that Python is the easiest language for me to "think in", syntax-wise. It is almost pseudo-code in its simplicity, and I like that it has extremely powerful namespaces. It also seems to me that it's easier to write programs in Python which ignore object orientation in favor of a more functional style, than it is in Ruby. I'm slowly falling out of love with OOP, and Ruby loves its objects. I also really like Python's libraries for numerical and scientific work. For whatever reason, Python took off in the scientific community, and it's got libraries like NumPy and SciPy which I haven't seen duplicated in Ruby. It's also easy to integrate with existing Fortran and C libraries... and if you've done much work with Fortran, you know that it might be blazing fast but it's not the most pleasant thing to work in. Much nicer to glue it together with Python. :-) Where Ruby shines for me is in its libraries for server configuration and web development. I like Python's webdev libraries, but I still find it easier to work with Rails or Sinatra than with Django or Bottle. I also think that Chef is one of the best things ever for managing servers in a programmatic fashion, and for that you need Ruby.
• michaelochurch 15y ago
  I voted "other" because it is really impossible for me to name one. I just don't know enough. OCaml wins on fundamentals. Scheme also rocks as a language. That said, there's something exciting about being able to leverage the latest OS technologies and solve the hardest real-world problems, which is an asset for the leading JVM awesomenesses: Scala and Clojure. Java sucks but there's a lot of awesome stuff available in that ecosystem (if you're discriminating and tell the FactoryFactory crowd to consider careers in investment banking). I just got off a 3.5 month consulting gig and I'm really itching to buckle down on a hard Scala or Clojure project. I would probably vote for Scala because static typing is such a huge win on large systems where reading others' code is as important as writing new code. It actually makes reading others' code fun to have static typing, because you get automatic documentation of structure right away.
• zackmorris 15y ago
  HyperTalk
• iag 15y ago
  damn... Matlab is not on the list! :)
• risrr 15y ago
  LPC
• adavies42 15y ago
  q (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28programming_language_from_Kx_Systems%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28programming_language_from_...)!
• fauigerzigerk 15y ago
  I guess I'm making a fool out of myself right now... but C# comes before C++ in the alphabetic sorting order ;-)
• TheRevoltingX 15y ago
  Out of all the languages I've used (C/C++/Perl/Javascript/Erlang/Objective-C/Ruby) I like Perl the best and javascript+ruby the least.
  • nona 15y ago
    That's really surprising to me. Whenever I tried Perl it always turned into a painful mess. When I started using Ruby I felt it was the best of Perl and the best of ... Smalltalk I suppose — and I never looked back. Maybe I'm missing something about Perl?
    • berntb 15y ago
      Ruby looks nice. You better follow the best practices for Perl and it is like the other scripting languages. Check the Modern Perl book. My reason to prefer Perl is because it is fun and the culture is good. The business case for Perl is CPAN. E.g., check Moose and additions like http://search.cpan.org/~flora/MooseX-Declare-0.35/lib/MooseX/Declare.pm http://search.cpan.org/~flora/MooseX-Declare-0.35/lib/MooseX...
• eagsalazar 15y ago
  Who in god's name voted for SQL??? And who voted for TCL??!!? Ouch! That hurts my soul!
• drobilla 15y ago
  I have always maintained that if you have an unqualified "favourite" thing, you are probably not very in to that type of thing :) I use C the most because it is the most appropriate tool for the job at hand for most of the jobs I do. I appreciate the simplicity and elegance of Scheme, and wish I could use it more. I envy Haskell's type system. None are my favourite. After all, all programming languages suck.
  • eostyx 15y ago
    Awe, that's the spirit!
• fauigerzigerk 15y ago
  I do like Go a lot. It's not on the list yet.
• funkah 15y ago
  I love JavaScript. C# is pretty rad too, but I do mostly front-end these days.
• ovatsus 15y ago
  Why isn't F# in the list?
• hypermike 15y ago
  I think we need another thread of favorite scripting languages. Shell would have more than 15 points then.
• fcassia 15y ago
  The beauty of Java is that is not ONLY a language, it´s three things: 1. A runtime environment 2. A software ecosystem 3. A language. :) So you can use 1. and 2. without having to write a line of Java if you don´t like it. There´s plenty of languages that run on top of the Java virtual machine: JRuby, xRuby, Jython, NetRexx... Even Lisp and Cobol if you want. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages There´s a yearly summit about new languages ported to the JVM... http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/
• leon_ 15y ago
  Wow, there are people who actually like JavaScript?!
  • gauravk92 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure they mean jQuery. Coffeescript is on the list as a separate item so that can't be it. Not much popularity behind Objective J and such. Definitely one of the javascript libs, I think we can all agree the javascript language sucks.
  • gauravk92 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure they mean jQuery. Coffeescript is on the list as a separate item so that can't be it. Not much popularity behind Objective J and such. Definitely one of the javascript libs, I think we can all agree the javascript language sucks.
• loup-vaillant 15y ago
  I voted Ocaml because it is what I'd call my favourite language: of all the language I have actually used, it is by far the one I enjoyed the most, and the one that made me most productive. However, Ocaml is not the end of it. I know of Haskell, and I sometimes resent Ocaml's value restriction, or lack of laziness. I know of Lisp, and I sometimes resent the complexity of Camlp4. However, Haskell and Lisp are not the end of it. See, http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm and http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf showed that with the right tools, a few hundreds lines of code is sufficient to make a TCP stack, or a Cairo-like graphic system, or even a whole programming language stack that's more powerful than Lisp itself. When I see that, I know that I think Lisp, Haskell, Forth… are already obsolete. The market just doesn't know it yet. However, COLAS and OMeta and Maru are probably not the end of it…
• aschobel 15y ago
  Go without a doubt.
• Maven911 15y ago
  I guess Bash would fit under Shell ?
• dmragone 15y ago
  As someone who is just starting to learn to code, this is an interesting list, but I can't help but want more info. The "why" each language is preferred is missing. Obviously some of this is in the comments, but summarizing that text will take quite some time. I can't help but think additional related questions might provide greater context to each preference.
• chrisallick 15y ago
  langs = list() f = open('langs.txt', 'r') content = f.readline() while content != "": line = content.strip() if line != "": temp = {} parts = line.split(" ") if "points" not in parts: temp['title'] = parts[0] nextline = f.readline().strip() parts = nextline.split(" ") temp['score'] = parts[0] langs.append( temp ) content = f.readline() newlist = sorted(langs, key=lambda k: int(k['score'])) print newlist """ [{'score': '6', 'title': 'Cobol'}, {'score': '6', 'title': 'Rexx'}, {'score': '7', 'title': 'Fortran'}, {'score': '8', 'title': 'Ada'}, {'score': '8', 'title': 'Pascal'}, {'score': '9', 'title': 'Groovy'}, {'score': '12', 'title': 'ColdFusion'}, {'score': '14', 'title': 'Delphi'}, {'score': '14', 'title': 'Tcl'}, {'score': '16', 'title': 'Shell'}, {'score': '18', 'title': 'Forth'}, {'score': '20', 'title': 'D'}, {'score': '23', 'title': 'Visual'}, {'score': '24', 'title': 'Smalltalk'}, {'score': '29', 'title': 'SQL'}, {'score': '30', 'title': 'Assembly'}, {'score': '31', 'title': 'OCaml'}, {'score': '32', 'title': 'Actionscript'}, {'score': '51', 'title': 'Lua'}, {'score': '57', 'title': 'Erlang'}, {'score': '74', 'title': 'Scheme'}, {'score': '92', 'title': 'Scala'}, {'score': '100', 'title': 'Other'}, {'score': '120', 'title': 'Perl'}, {'score': '123', 'title': 'Objective'}, {'score': '125', 'title': 'Lisp'}, {'score': '163', 'title': 'CoffeeScript'}, {'score': '187', 'title': 'Clojure'}, {'score': '192', 'title': 'C++'}, {'score': '194', 'title': 'Java'}, {'score': '205', 'title': 'Haskell'}, {'score': '235', 'title': 'PHP'}, {'score': '303', 'title': 'C#'}, {'score': '355', 'title': 'C'}, {'score': '515', 'title': 'JavaScript'}, {'score': '718', 'title': 'Ruby'}, {'score': '1133', 'title': 'Python'}] """
• MaysonL 15y ago
  Oberon-2
• seanalltogether 15y ago
  The number of votes for Objective-C is really funny to me, because I've never talked with a fellow objc developer that would describe it as their favorite language. Apples platform may be their favorite platform to develop for, but I and everyone else begrudgingly uses objc to target it. Granted, they have been adding some very useful features to the language over the past couple years that I rely heavily on, but I'd never go so far as to call it my favorite.
  • RandallBrown 15y ago
    I like the message sending syntax of objective-c. At first it was so weird, but now I almost hate looking at anything else. After awhile, I think most people even begin to appreciate it's verbosity. You can make it read like english pretty well. Of course, I'm sure I wouldn't like Objective-C without Cocoa or I wouldn't like writing it on Windows. I've never been able to get round the whole whitespace thing in Python and Ruby. I really like brackets and they've always been the strongest thing to signal where code starts and ends.
    • jeltz 15y ago
      A minor correction: Ruby is not as whitespace dependent as Python. Ruby uses "end" to end blocks, not changed indentation. Whitespace matters though in other ways, for example newlines and in some places if there is a space or not.
• khyryk 15y ago
  I picked Python because I like Python the language. I put up with the standard library, I'm not thrilled about there being so few decent cross-platform IDE's supporting Python, and module hell can drive me nuts, especially considering the fact that a minor version discrepancy means the module won't work (e.g., module built for 3.1 refusing to work on Python 3.2, although perhaps there's an incredibly simple solution to this which has evaded me thus far).
• duodecim 15y ago
  IMHO, Python is probably one of the best languages in general. But I consider Perl, its opposite in many ways, one of my favourites. In Perl I can be witty and find my personal style. Sadly enough, my code poetry might not be somebody else's. Reading other people's Perl code can be hard. On the other end of the spectrum, Python feels aesthetically dull to me sometimes. But it's a great language to program in with larger groups of people, even when they have different skill levels and coding styles. In the end, these languages are all just tools; you can do a hammer's job with a screwdriver, but really all tools have their purpose in the right context. (Go's missing, though.)
• Matz3 15y ago
  ABAP.
• fuzzythinker 15y ago
  No F#?
• bri3d 15y ago
  I answered Objective-C only because I'm considering the entire ecosystem around a language in addition to the actual language (its features, idioms, and syntax). Objective-C isn't a particularly pretty language, in my opinion - but when XCode's powerful code completion, decent visual debugger, and awesome static analysis come into play, it's a lot more attractive. Plus, for me, programming is about the goal, with the journey an oft-pleasant and very engrossing side effect. Objective-C hits the sweet spot where the language and toolchain gets out of my way and lets me build beautiful, functional software that people actually use.
• rocsteady 15y ago
  C++
• PaulGrinsBig 15y ago
  Got to be C/C++ because everything relies on it in some fashion. For example, interpreted languages almost always use a C/C++ built interpreter. It's also the most direct route to assembly which is the ONE....
• SeanLuke 15y ago
  This voting scheme is known as "single-vote-plurality". And it's a giant suckfest. Beyond two candidates, it completely falls apart, and tends to suggest very different results than the actual preferences of the voters. Hypothetical example. Let's say that 1/4 of HN likes C, then Lisp, then Python, then Java. 1/4 of HN likes Python, then Lisp, then C, then Java. 1/5 likes Lisp, then C, then Python, then Java. And 3/10 like Java, then Lisp, then Python, then C. So we have: 1. Java has the highest number of votes, even though 7/10 of HN thinks it's the worst language. Java wins! 2. Lisp has the fewest number of votes, even though it's the only language to appear in the top two preferences of 100% of the voters. Lisp loses! In other words, the results from your voting scheme suggested the opposite of what people really liked (and disliked). This is a known, and very common, pathology of single-vote-plurality and becomes more and more of a problem the more candidates enter the race (and you have a gazillion of them). Since you can't have people easily express their rank ordered preferences on HN (eliminating Condorcet, IRV, and the like), the next best thing would be to do approval voting. To do approval voting, you'd change the wording in your posting to: "What languages do you like? Vote for as many as you want." Then the winner is then the language with the most votes.
  • siavosh 15y ago
    I agree with the flawed voting scheme. What I don't understand is why the number one voted comment thread is on how great C# is when I can't last remember an article on HN talking about C#. This whole thread seems so contradictory to my perceptions of the HN community. Either there's a whole host of C# lovers that finally decided to participate in todays discussion (a silent majority), or microsoft evangelists are taking over HN! I'm so confused.
    • eli 15y ago
      I don't think anything sneaky is going on. I don't code in C# because the MS stack doesn't really make sense for what I'm doing, but it's a good language with a fantastic IDE. Put another way, there are a fair number of HN articles about PHP but I don't think that's because it's an inherently great language.
• codesuela 15y ago
  everyone stop upvoting python ! http://imgur.com/gtLOb http://imgur.com/gtLOb
• finin 15y ago
  Prolog ∈ Other
• finin 15y ago
  prolog ∈ Other
• mycodebreaks 15y ago
  I see Python leading in this poll. Two things that can be happening: 1. Python is going mainstream. 2. Programmers who are hackernews readers like Python more.
• FredBrach 15y ago
  Hey, the C language is pretty well scored. I really really loved the C. For me, it's the king/father language. Everything is in it seriously (I mean, types, flow controls, memory management etc.), and it's just on top of the assembly language. I could code with C during centuries I think. By the way, Ruby is pretty well scored also. I should try it eh. Is it for back-end programming or front-end, native apps? What's the point with it?(Really less code?) And about Python? Why is it so awesome?
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • wging 15y ago
    >And about Python? Why is it so awesome? It's concise and powerful. Not as fast as C but if you think 'everything is in it (C) seriously' then you're missing out (except in the sense that the reference implementation of Python is built in C). It's relatively easy to do cool things. Look at http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting for good examples. (This will also help you see why Ruby is cool.) Things that knock my socks off are generator expressions (expression(x) for x in iterable if another_expression(iterable)) and indexing (Reverse a string s? s[::-1]. And this notation does generalize...).
  • read_wharf 15y ago
    "And about Python? Why is it so awesome?" Because you already know it. Turn around and look at the pseudo-code on your whiteboard.
    • FredBrach 15y ago
      Generally my pseudo code looks like: for all for all for all =) I highly prefer engineered coding than syntaxic coding. So there is no code in my white board, only -french- words. Code follow. And unlike mathematic and what most people think, concerning coding, details never stop you. Or really really really rarely. Bad design (=engineering) do and a lot.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• littlemerman 15y ago
  Circlejerk.
• cinquemb 15y ago
  i like the constructive conversations. when i first saw this i was afraid this might turn into which one is better in the comments. glad to see a mature crowd on HN,very informative =D
• veritas9 15y ago
  We did something similar with the 40,000 code submissions made on CodeEval last year. Python was also the winner :) http://blog.codeeval.com/the-most-popular-programming-languages-of-201 http://blog.codeeval.com/the-most-popular-programming-langua...
• singular 15y ago
  I really like go. It's very succinct, clean and orthogonal, yet is enormously powerful. The amazing compilation speed and concurrency primitives are the icing on the cake. I especially like the lack of a type hierarchy. I have come to think that type hierarchical structures are somewhat brittle - you create these initially correct representations, however when something changes or isn't quite right suddenly you either have to rewrite your hierarchy which is potentially a lot of work, or hack it up whereby it ends up not only incorrect but also misleading. In go, you get implicit, dynamic interfaces whereby you define an interface and get duck typing against it without having to explicitly indicate that types implement it. The capabilities of a type determine its abstraction, nothing more.
• singular 15y ago
  I really like go. It's very succinct, clean and orthogonal, yet is enormously powerful. The amazing compilation speed and concurrency primitives are the icing on the cake. I especially like the lack of a type hierarchy. I have come to think that type hierarchical structures are somewhat brittle - you create these initially correct representations, however when something changes or isn't quite right suddenly you either have to rewrite your hierarchy which is potentially a lot of work, or hack it up whereby it ends up not only incorrect but also misleading. In go, you get implicit, dynamic interfaces whereby you define an interface and get duck typing against it without having to explicitly indicate that types implement it. The capabilities of a type determine its abstraction, nothing more.
• dbh937 15y ago
  LOLcode anyone?
• necenzurat 15y ago
  what? no Assembly?
• amizya 15y ago
  Python or GTFO.
• cploonker 15y ago
  SQL is the best
• old-gregg 15y ago
  Hm... Maybe one of the reasons why replacement-for-C kind of languages don't quite take off is because people apparently still like C quite a lot.
• Kupsztal 15y ago
  LabVIEW
• evincarofautumn 15y ago
  Voted C, C++ & Haskell, but other languages are also nice. C is pleasant for its simplicity and straightforwardness. C++ is huge and complex, and I’ve never believed in OOP, but I know of no better language for generic programming. Haskell, on the other hand, is rather small and pretty. It doesn’t get in your way, it informs your writing in other languages, and its type system makes the angels weep.
• jhuni 15y ago
  There are many impressive Lisp dialects which aren't mentioned here like Mark Tarver's Shen programming language and John Stutts Kernel programming language, so I am just going to vote for Lisp which hopefully covers most of these dialects. I have been a Lisper for over a year. I am not particularly impressed with most things which aren't Lisp based or which aren't at least functional. In particular, I am not impressed by Python. Admittedly, I am biased towards functional languages like Lisp because I am a mathematician.
• bamdadd 15y ago
  I like ruby with RubyMine IDE . They work fine on the server side apps (web and console). Havn't tried desktop apps and dont know if it is possible ( i know its possible with jruby and swing but no info for ruby it self). It has a good feeling and flexibility when you work with it. Good class library and gems are easy to fetch and install
• hypertech 15y ago
  MATLAB/Octave ... by far!
• gcb 15y ago
  Those always reflect "vote the language you like the most from the 2 or 3 you use frequently"
• zorked 15y ago
  Hacker News is all about Python/Ruby/Clojure/Scala/Haskell most of the time, but then we find that there is this huge group of very happy Windows/C# developers that are passionate about their environments. Where are you the rest of the time? What have you people been building?
• ZenDan 15y ago
  How about Go? #golang
• soapdog 15y ago
  My favorite language is not listed , it is LiveCode from http://www.runrev.com http://www.runrev.com, it is an HyperCard on steroids. I am very productive with it and it is terribly fun to use. Besides that I like Lisp/Scheme =)
• paliderek 15y ago
  what, no modula-2 or modula-3?
• reactor 15y ago
  Python, Never comes in your way.
• gemlogger 15y ago
  I just broke down and got a login on HN because of this poll. I was astounded at the number of python votes. Mmmm -- I got a reg and also voted for python, but still... Why is this poll so lopsided? I would have guessed a murkier distribution, after all, we all have to write in at least 5-6 langs just to get along. Does HN simply attract pythonistas?
• bigiain 15y ago
  Most of my "for fun" coding lately has been in Arduino's C/C++ language subset - which, given it's lack of many of the standard libraries usually assumed available when people talk about C or C++, I tend to not think of it as "C programming". In fact the resource-limited nature of Arduino programming feels much closer to assembly than anything else. (Perl is still my "favourite" of all the languages I get paid to write…)
• wiradikusuma 15y ago
  Favorite != most used. Sometimes you're "forced" to use a language because "that's what the company use". For example, I use Java in my company, but I won't make it my favorite.
• username 15y ago
  R
• dajobe 15y ago
  How do I vote this polling crap down? Pointless and subjective and if this was stackoverflow, would be deleted.
• jeffclark 15y ago
  I'd be interested in hearing why anyone would choose Tcl. I have to use it during the day, but use Ruby on my side-project. Tcl and it's lists (and lists-of-lists) is wicked painful - especially compared to my Ruby experience at this point.
• murali89 15y ago
  SML
• Badkangar00 15y ago
  F#
• jokermatt999 15y ago
  I like Python because I'm an inexperienced and infrequent programmer. While I took a few courses on programming (VB, Java), it wasn't til I discovered Python that I would actually code in my own time. All the boilerplate crap I had to deal with for Java was wiped away, and I could just write. I'm sure if I wrote more complex things, I could find better languages, but for simply getting things done and just jumping in and writing a few lines, Python just feels right. Does that sound about right to those of you with more experience?
  • kinleyd 15y ago
    Give Ruby a try. You will be pleasantly surprised. I was.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • gitarr 15y ago
    The real beauty of Python is the fact that it is easy for beginning programmers, yes, but it has also a lot to offer for experienced coders concerning all the advanced things they might need. It's no accident that services like Dropbox[1] or YouTube[2], both arguably very complex systems, are relying on Python as their language of choice. [1] http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how-dropbox-did-it-and-how-python-helped-4896698 http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• mythz 15y ago
  F# and Dart should also be on this list considering they're the source of a lot of programming language innovation that's happening atm.
• jes5199 15y ago
  I voted for Clojure because so many of design decisions seem to be correct, but there's still plenty to complain about: unreadable stack traces. slow interpreter startup. meaningless function names in core. I think I really want an immutable-data language that uses rubyish message-passing style.
• stigt 15y ago
  No single language is the best for every situation. Know the tools and pick the right one for the problem at hand.
• ronik 15y ago
  My favorite language is the one I don't know yet and desperately want to master. Objective C, in my case.
• abruzzi 15y ago
  Depends on what you're doing, but favorite implies I enjoy it, which would have to be something that isn't used for work, which would be something Pd/Max for me.
• objectiveJ4Life 15y ago
  Add Objective-J
• KC8ZKF 15y ago
  What? No love for Prolog?
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• forbes 15y ago
  Most of these languages are not as good as my favourite language, Blub, apart from the Lisps.
• elimisteve 15y ago
  My list: 1. Go 2. Python 3. Everything else
• Calamitous 15y ago
  I'm curious as to why D doesn't get more love. It's had a pretty rocky liftoff, but there's a lot to like there, regardless of your preferred programming paradigm.
• ankurdhama 15y ago
  How ironic is that when someone ask you to write a program that put some text ob screen and you are unfortunately using C#/Java or similar languages, your code comes out something as : public class main { public static void main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Hello world"); } } Which should have been just: (print "Hello world")
• thrashr888 15y ago
  Go
• zygovox 15y ago
  Groovy
• middayc 15y ago
  rebol (& family)
• kinleyd 15y ago
  Ruby and Lisp for me. A couple of years ago it would have been Python but not any more.
• anon_d 15y ago
  Standard ML. The implementations and the standard library situation both need a lot of work, but the language itself is by far the cleanest and most practical very-high-level language I've encountered.
• Threshold128 15y ago
  Matlab
• LinaLauneBaer 15y ago
  I would love to hear from the people who voted for Rexx explain what they are doing with Rexx - I am really curious. A few years ago when working for a bank in Germany I had to learn Rexx but only for some extremely unsophisticated stuff - so I am asking: What are you doing with Rexx and what makes it your favorite programming language?
• teresko 15y ago
  People see to be confusing "favorite language" with "language i use".
• pknerd 15y ago
  i really loved working on C# it's quite cool but for web RoR and PHP are best
• meric 15y ago
  Does anyone here feel that all of these programming languages have their own flaws? I started programming 8 years ago (mostly as a hobby), and I feel like all these languages are missing something. That said, my "favourite" language is Haskell, but I don't really like it. I've only used Haskell since a year ago and there are still many concepts I have to master. Maybe my feelings will improve, but if they do it won't be by that much in absolute terms. Emacs and Vim? Twenty years later and these are still the state of the art? Even when our computers are at least 1000 times more performant? I guess there are IDE's out there trying to do better, but in the end I'm still typing text into a computer, occasionally getting autocompletes that is exactly what I want, but usually its not. Do I like programming? Yes I do, I like programming more than I hate the tools I have to use.
• skeptical 15y ago
  Meh... this childish vote again... Still surprised that python is the most popular. I would expect (nothing against those two fine languages) coffeescript and ruby fanboys to flood the poll. I guess many hackers prefer to do their job discretely instead of being vocal about it.
• 178 15y ago
  I went with Shell since I am not even a programmer, more of a designer. Shell scripts helps me automate almost everything.
• coolestuk 15y ago
  other: hypertalk http://www.runrev.com/ http://www.runrev.com/
• rogermugs 15y ago
  no awk?
• guard-of-terra 15y ago
  This list has SQL but lacks XSLT. XSLT is a wonderful thing.
• mezozoysky 15y ago
  D. The only way.
• rtisticrahul 15y ago
  C still remains my favorite programming language. Though compared to modern languages it has fallen way behind, still nothing beats the simplicity of C. With less theory to learn compared to other languages, the power of C lies in the implementation only. Just few simple ayntaxes combined with terrific logic can make some really powerful applications. Also, maybe little bit nostalgic here, but it feels good to return to C every now and then just to make some highly logical program and challenge the logical side of my brain.
• martinbottanek 15y ago
  I voted for Ruby and JavaScript because that's what I use. I've tried some Python/Django but it somehow didn't feel right. I guess it really comes down to your personal preferences.
• varunsaini 15y ago
  Why have a single favorite language, use language as a tool to get the things done.But for the question sake I will say Java and Python, but if this questions come up next year, I will like to click few more...
• micebiz 15y ago
  PHP
• spdegabrielle 15y ago
  Racket http://www.racket-lang.org/ http://www.racket-lang.org/
• drpancake 15y ago
  You can see a chart here: http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=3746692 http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=3746692
  • johnx123-up 15y ago
    Throwing: Warning: file_get_contents(http://open.dapper.net/RunDapp?dappName=HNChart&v=1&applyToUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D3746692) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable in /home/content/c/a/l/callindia/html/hnvote/hncharts/chart/index.php on line 6 Error fetching the Hacker News Poll.
• bentis 15y ago
  Perl
• avallark 15y ago
  PL/SQL
• jdefr89 15y ago
  Should SQL really be up there?
• asjo 15y ago
  Here is a plot of the votes (updated hourly): * http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/wyfpl/data.png http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/wyfpl/data.png
  • hepek 15y ago
    Did you keep track of the changes? I see relative changes in votes every time I check. It would be really cool to see how things went. You could also infer a geographical distribution of voters, as this poll goes through time zones :)
• abalashov 15y ago
  In my consulting work, I seem to have benefitted greatly from a shortage of people still versed in old-school systems work, heavy C, Perl, and solid knowledge of the esoteric feature sets of traditional RDBMs. There is a decreasing number of people in the market who really know their way around Linux and other Unices as well, and who can bring some historical insight to bear. I am not a bearded hacker. I'm only 26, but it seems that everyone in my age group has moved onto fashionable web programming tool chains, Ruby, etc. Personally, that's just as well; leaves me with less competition. :-)
• shimon_e 15y ago
  No Limbo? Dennis Ritchie will be let down.
• msgilligan 15y ago
  Groovy: Added two hours late and out of alphabetical order. Not the most popular language, but definitely a rising star. Too bad it's not getting a fair shake in this poll.
• joemanaco 15y ago
  i dont have a favorite language, but i really enjoy to play around with BlitzMax and Monkey.
• bitcracker 15y ago
  LISP and Scheme still have one killer feature all other languages don't have: extremely powerful macros. http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/Lisp-Notes/Macros.html http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/Lisp-Notes/Macros.html This article gives a good insight what about LISP is so awesome: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html I also vote for Ada because this is the best language I know to write maximum quality software. I would love to make money for living by coding Ada for Embedded Systems.
• akadien 15y ago
  +1 for Go.
• luriel 15y ago
  Awk, C, Go, rc, Scheme. Simple and conceptually-consistent languages that my simple mind can fully understand.
• cema 15y ago
  I marked C#, Clojure and Javascript. I use C# and Javascript at work, and enjoy both. (Not saying I enjoy .NET though, just the language.) I like the way C# is evolving towards functional programming and includes new paradigms while retaining the (ostensible) familiarity of Java and C. Clojure is a great language and there is a great community around it. Here I am just a beginner, though, and it is not part of my everyday life. Hopefully it might change in the future.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• backspaces 15y ago
  I am 70 f*ing years old and have kicked butt on many platforms. And I am amazed at a current revolution being missed by many: Javascript Everywhere. Browser, desktop, networking (JSON for transport), server (node.js). One Language To Rule Them All. I'm a student at UNM and took a graphics course which was opengl based. I asked if either GLSL or WebGL would be OK for homework. After all, webgl had finalized its spec 3 days earlier! Yup, why not .. the prof was even interested enough to write several webgl demos himself. Processing, the wonderful 2D/3D system approachable by designers was converted to ProcessingJS by John Resig. HTML5 is mind blowing. So in short, I've left all the rest behind. This brilliant ecology is no longer just a language .. its far too rich for that. Imagine the surprise when someone asks: "What's a JS library" and I answer "A URL". Biggest fears? I'm concerned that some of the attempts to "tame" JS may screw it up. Will "Require" make JS as hard to deploy as Python with a web of interdependencies that end up being intractable? (i.e. nearly O(n^n)? And will classes be as bad as I think they may be? And will Google go all evil on us with Dart?
• Mac7 15y ago
  WLanguage from PCSoft-France
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• swah 15y ago
  [Witty comment on the correlation of great software being written in the two most hated programming languages.]
• vinayan3 15y ago
  A lot of love for C#. I would have assumed that there would be a lot of C# / .NET bashing.
• mycodebreaks 15y ago
  Come on Hackernews! Is it hard to sort the list by number of voites?
• whatthefunk 15y ago
  programmer happiness. end of story.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• vonkow 15y ago
  No love for Ladder Logic? sniff
• littlemerman 15y ago
  This proves that python is the best language.
• shalakhin 15y ago
  I think programmers have to choose best suited tools for solution considering existing requirements and constraints. But giving an answer I'd like to vote for Go. :)
• rbc 15y ago
  These days, I'd have to say Smalltalk is my favorite. I think more modern languages are still catching up. Modern open source implementations like Squeak and Pharo make Smalltalk very accessible.
• jebblue 15y ago
  How is Haskell almost as high as Java? I've never seen it in use anywhere, Java everywhere.
• lunchbox 15y ago
  Here are the languages ranked by likes/dislikes ratio (I compared the above poll with the "dislike" poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3748961 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3748961). For example, for each person who downvoted Clojure, there were 28.8 who upvoted it. This ranking is fairer to languages that are well liked by those who use them, but not as well known: Clojure 28.8 Python 26.5 Haskell 19.7 C 17.3 Lua 16.4 Lisp 11.5 Erlang 9.9 Ruby 8.4 Scheme 8.1 C# 7.9 OCaml 7.3 Smalltalk 7.1 Scala 6.4 D 4.4 CoffeeScript 3.6 JavaScript 3.5 Forth 3.2 Groovy 2.9 Assembly 2.5 Ada 1.7 Objective C 1.6 Perl 1.6 SQL 1.4 Pascal 1.3 Rexx 1.3 Delphi 1.2 C++ 1.0 Tcl 0.9 Fortran 0.7 PHP 0.7 Shell 0.7 Java 0.6 Actionscript 0.6 ColdFusion 0.4 Cobol 0.1 Visual Basic 0.1
  • beza1e1 15y ago
    Not everybody can downvote. That adds significant noise to this data.
    • lunchbox 15y ago
      I used the term "downvote" figuratively -- I don't mean literal downvotes on this poll (I don't think anyone can downvote a poll option anyway, and even if you could I wouldn't be able to isolate upvotes from downvotes since we just see the combined number); I mean votes for "least favorite language" in the other poll.
• laktek 15y ago
  Where's Go??
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• sashaeslami 15y ago
  Java's the best!
• erez 15y ago
  Are you referring to SQL the standard (which isn't a programming language), or to any enhanced flavour of it?
• north14 15y ago
  Gotta be PHP! Half the web is built on it!
• railsmax 15y ago
  That's cool question! It's like who is stronger Vandam, Chuck Norris or Stallone )) It will be great to include chart here - to illustrate all languages with more then 'N' points for example.
• supervillain 15y ago
  Here's my programming language usage history so far. (learned order) 1. DOS batch scripting (1994) 2. C (1996) 3. Bash (1998) 4. Pascal (2000) 5. PHP (2001) 6. Ruby (2002) 7. Javascript (2004) 8. Python (2005) 9. Ruby (2009-present) Now I'm in love with Ruby more than ever, I turned it down several times during my college years in favor of Python, but finding Ruby is like finding your true love. I was in loved with her more than ever. I have gone through Python, and back to Ruby and I am much happier as a programmer. :-)
• jhawk28 15y ago
  Go is my current favorite language.
• ccrraaiigg 15y ago
  The first thing I always check out when looking at a programming language is the debugger. Smalltalk's debugger is the most useful and fun because of the dynamism of the system as a whole.
• Ziomislaw 15y ago
  wtf, you put in cobol and visual basic but forget to add Go?
• pekar666 15y ago
  I love D
• bibin71554 15y ago
  I like Coldfusion language .....Best CF
• msutherl 15y ago
  Max/MSP/Jitter. Dataflow 4 life.
• zdcshh 15y ago
  c、java and python is professional！
• ericcholis 15y ago
  Any Visual FoxPro refugees out there? It was the first language used for a serious project. It's still one of my favorites due to nostalgia. I do fire it up occasionally when I need a quick tool written for the office.
• gcr 15y ago
  Where's Racket?
• lectrick 15y ago
  Coding in Ruby all day using Sublime Text 2 has been totally awesome for a little while now. Debugging is not as slick as in Visual Studio-land but... that's what test coverage is for! (and it's super easy to do...) Here, I wrote a class today which subclassed Delegator (https://gist.github.com/2305169 https://gist.github.com/2305169) that will let you return a value from a function that looks like a typical single scalar value but actually has "hidden" attributes riding along with it. Smoke and mirrors :) This is the first time I used this class or the Delegate pattern for that matter. (I came at programming from a Psych major.) Notice the test inline with the class definition itself at the bottom that is only run when the file itself is run (not when it's merely included by another file). A simple Command-B (for Build) in Sublime Text 2 and I get the tests passing in a split second and know I didn't break anything.