7 ms·

Choosing a Programming Language

30 points by fawce 14y ago

greg5green 14y ago
I tried to take the quiz but the app the OP built it in on FB kept asking over and over and over for permissions I wasn't willing to give it. :(
sswezey 14y ago
The graphics in this are not very helpful, inconsistent and in some cases wrong. Your 3-d size/cpu/memory was impossible to read, there was no origin. Secondly, the intended uses and paradigms were wrong. Lisp can do object-oriented programming with the CLOS and I'm pretty sure C++ was designed to be a general purpose language. In the intended uses, you have so many categories that are one off or very similar to others: what's the difference between web, web application and client-side? Also, the graphics were not sharp and looked hazy. And the languages choices were not consistent, you have Clojure on some of them but not others. And in general, benchmarks don't mean anything without context. This article has very little insight and has quite bad presentation.
- iand675 14y ago
  Another wrong issue in the article is that Haskell was not created with the intent of it being a general purpose programming language.
nullc 14y ago
C not for applications? (or LISP for that matter) A little bias showing there.
- muuh-gnu 14y ago
  Not only bias, but obviously pure ignorance too, at least with respect to Lisp. In his table, Lisp seems to be unsuitable both for meta programming and multiple dispatch, which always have been touted as Lisp's major features.
  - reeses 14y ago
    It's apparently not aspect-oriented, either. The article is full of wrong information, wrong logic, and wrong conclusions. I feel embarrassed for the author, who must have spent a lot of time to produce something that is an intellectual net loss for anyone who reads it.
- tater 14y ago
  Same for Objective-C. I disregarded the entire blog post as soon as I noticed.
monkeyfacebag 14y ago
There is no single best language. Instead, what you get from any sufficiently good programming language is a series of tradeoffs. Haskell, for example, provides the benefits of pure functions (lazy evaluation, composable memory transactions, ability to reason about code) but in so doing it takes away your ability to arbitrarily mutate state and perform IO. That's a tradeoff. Python provides a clean, easily readable syntax that leverages whitespace. But you can't define multi-line lambdas. That's a tradeoff. Most of the languages on the author's list use garbage collection, yet another trade off. Importantly, it is nigh on impossible to understand the pros and cons of these tradeoffs unless you learn the language first. So get a dart board out and pick a language at random. Learn it well enough to find things you don't like about it. Then learn another language that fixes the problems you had with the first and figure out what you don't like about that language. And so on. Also, be aware that this process will never, ever end. Because there is no single best language. Except Haskell ;)
- DanWaterworth 14y ago
  Haskell is by no means perfect. You should try learning a dependently typed language like Agda or Idris in order to understand some of its flaws.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    > You should try learning a dependently typed language like Agda or Idris in order to understand some of its flaws. Why not just try something a bit more mainstream like COQ?
    - DanWaterworth 14y ago
      Coq is also a good choice. Coming from Haskell, though, I think Agda/Idris have a shallower learning curve. It also sits more happily on the theorem proving side of things than the programming side.
- vorg 14y ago
  > it is nigh on impossible to understand the pros and cons of these tradeoffs unless you learn the language first That's because there's virtually no easily accessible objective material decision-makers can use to select between them. Because of the high financial stakes involved, every company and consultant has an interest in promoting their own language memes in businesses, government, universities and schools.
notb 14y ago
I don't understand these questions: “Is optimization of speed premature while productivity languishes?”; “Are semantic elegance and lexical simplicity just means by which to further our productive capacity?” The flowery language is confusing me. Is there any real content here? I've never heard anyone talk about programming languages like this. Writing like this just makes it harder to understand and seems like putting on airs
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
vxNsr 14y ago
The graphs seem to imply that functionality wise C# is the best choice.... I don't know much about languages but if that's true I wonder why it's not taught more often in schools, most classes I've seen are either for java or c++, and then assembly and matlab
- doktrin 14y ago
  The case could be made that universities teaching Java are already catering too much to industry. For my part, I would vastly prefer working with a lisp, ML or other esoteric language while in school. There's no shortage of time afterwards to work with more pragmatic languages & frameworks. edit : not meant to imply that Lisp or Ocaml are not "pragmatic", just that the likelihood of working with them as a professional developer are substantially lower than Java / C# or Ruby / Python.
  - yuushi 14y ago
    Why does it have to be limited to a single language at all? Exposure to multiple languages should be the norm.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  It actually is taught in many schools.
- samirahmed 14y ago
  C# does fit many needs and molds and could be used as general purpose language of instruction. However decisions are seldom made on how 'good' a language is. Java, C++ have plenty of free, multi-platform tooling and resources. C# requires lots of (hard to get or costly) Microsoft products and tooling like Visual Studio. C/C++ has the additionally advantage that students are exposed to memory management issues. Not to mention that C/C++ and Java are the top 3 languages on the KIOBE index and have been for the last decade. C# is newer than all three has risen in popularity over the last decade. Matlab is much higher level language, usually targeted at (non computer) engineering disciplines because its is easier to learn, and provides lots of tools and libraries for simulation/computation/statistics.
agentultra 14y ago
Analysis paralysis! The computer is a machine. It understands one language. Everything else is sugar on top. The language you should choose is the one that exists at the right level of abstraction for the problem you're trying to solve. That's a very academic way of saying, "choose the right tool for the job." Personally I'm of the opinion that you can get really far knowing C and Common Lisp. They represent two fundamentally different models of computation and all of the other languages (save the Smalltalk offshoots and obscure ones I haven't had the pleasure of experimenting with yet) are essentially sub-sets of functionality from one or both of these two languages. It's too easy to get caught up in the "feature creep," of all of the languages available today. Some will claim "immutability by default," is a feature. It's not. Any sufficiently sophisticated evaluator of a language can stratify a program into a process capable of emulating a machine that can treat all memory as "immutable by default." It's important to remember that often these languages are created to solve a specific problem and then evolve over time to become more general. It is best, in my experience, to just go straight to the source and work down to what you need.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  > Personally I'm of the opinion that you can get really far knowing C and Common Lisp. Yup. I advocate a fast running & low level language like C plus a quick to get started with lots of libraries language like Python. At the end of the day, unless pure algorithms are the deliverables (and it may very well be), it is really about the libraries and ecosystem. In the majority of cases, it is simplest to re-use code someone already wrote. Who cares if this language compiles to assembler and is super functional and does all kinds of fancy tricks, can it read from Postgres or talk to RabbitMQ? Does it have an easy way to parse JSON or generate uuid's, or do I have to now spend time writing db drivers, json parsers before even starting on the real problem?
  - cpprototypes 14y ago
    I agree that it's enough to know well one low level (or medium level) language and one high level language. For me, I decided a while ago that the two languages will be Java and Javascript. It was an easy decision since I use those languages at work, they both have healthy and growing ecosystems, and active communities.
richardjordan 14y ago
I suspect like a lot of people who came late to programming my choice was initially dictated by simple pragmatic concerns: What can I learn quickly? ...that has a fairly simple forgiving syntax ...that has a ton of online help and resources ...that I can get a prototype product out simply with ...etc - I think it's a not atypical set of concerns. For me, because of all the online help and community and ease of getting something useful working quickly I landed on ruby, at first using rails. My analysis may have been simpler than the OP but as I learned more I was able to understand more of what I needed, where my choices were good, where not. I was able to pick up other tools and languages as my interest was piqued. So no one choice is right for everyone but this approach worked for me, but more than anything the key is to drop the analysis and learn SOMETHING ...once you start it's easier to pick up more.
fleitz 14y ago
Seriously how many people here write programs to solve k-means or n-body problems? Who fucking cares how many lines of code it takes to write k-means, and who fucking cares how long it takes to execute or how much memory it consumes. Most of us write software that moves bits from an API or DB to a screen. If we're lucky we translate a couple of those values to a color or something. Why are benchmarks so focused on code no one writes? How many successful YC companies aren't CRUD apps? Type the problem you have into google, write your stuff in the language that has the most concise stackoverflow answers on how to solve that problem.
- samirahmed 14y ago
  I somewhat agree. Choosing a programming language involves only a part of the factors listed here (speed, memory, paradigm) but also community, resources, development time and available framework, tooling and libraries. It is hard to quantify those through and stackoverflow posts and github repos are an insufficient metric
  - fleitz 14y ago
    Fully agree, I like the Twitter/Facebook model, write the whole thing in a god awful 'slow' language that's quick to get code out the door, then rewrite in much 'faster' languages once the feature set solidifies.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  Exactly. Language Benchmark is probably the most useless and counter-productive place to start talking about language and platform comparison.
  - banachtarski 14y ago
    This is a bit exaggerated right? When you buy a car, you aren't racing with it, but the amount of time it goes to 60 mph still matters, even if you're looking for fuel efficiency or something else.
    - 14y ago
just2n 14y ago
The grids comparing language features are mostly incorrect, generally towards a stereotype that's common but incorrect, or very dated.
vorg 14y ago
The RedMonk chart measures language popularity by activity on GitHub and StackOverflow. Top business languages Cobol, Transact-SQL, and PL/SQL aren't included at all in the 84 languages listed so the popularity measurement criteria is flawed. The Redmonk measurement also seems to be gamed because the second cluster in the chart includes some languages with backers who are heavily promoting the popularity of the language, including using Stack Overflow as their primary documentation effort and creating numerous shell projects on Github.
terhechte 14y ago
I write Python & Objective-C most of the day, used to work for several years in a PHP/JS shop and have to code in Ruby and/or C from time to time. I recently felt the urge to learn a new language which is distinctly different from what I know so that I can learn new things. I considered Erlang, Common Lisp, Clojure, Go, Haskell, Scala and Elixir. I plan to use it for server side web development and if possible for command line scripting (where I currently oftentimes use Python). After much back and forth I ended up having to decided between Clojure, Erlang or Scala. I then went with Scala because it seemed to offer the best of both worlds: It has a good actor library with Akka, it has macro support, it is functional, it offers good OOP support (to ease the transition for me), and as a boon it also allows to develop for Android, something I may want to tackle in the future. So far I'm really happy. The only downsides are that the REPL starts up pretty slow (I'm used to Python, which starts up way faster), and package installation (especially of Java packages) confuses me at times. I still may want to go to Clojure or Common Lisp from here, but right now I'm happy with my choice.
- Nick_C 14y ago
  > Scala... REPL starts up pretty slow. I wonder if your setup is faulty. My Scala REPL takes a couple of seconds to start. Admittedly longer than Python's, but not enough to worry about it. I'm on an old clunker laptop too. Also, you may be interested in this course on Functional Programming in Scala run by Martin Odersky himself. It started last week. https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
  - happy_dino 13y ago
    I'd say that this sounds pretty too slow, too. My REPL starts in less than a second.
dbbolton 14y ago
I'm pretty curious as to how the author came up with the answers in that quiz.
malodyets 14y ago
How does a non-programmer write a guide to programming languages that has any value? Full of errors and misinformation gleaned from far too many hours reading websites and far too few hours writing code.

30 points by fawce 14y ago

I tried to take the quiz but the app the OP built it in on FB kept asking over and over and over for permissions I wasn't willing to give it. :(

sswezey 14y ago

The graphics in this are not very helpful, inconsistent and in some cases wrong. Your 3-d size/cpu/memory was impossible to read, there was no origin. Secondly, the intended uses and paradigms were wrong. Lisp can do object-oriented programming with the CLOS and I'm pretty sure C++ was designed to be a general purpose language. In the intended uses, you have so many categories that are one off or very similar to others: what's the difference between web, web application and client-side? Also, the graphics were not sharp and looked hazy. And the languages choices were not consistent, you have Clojure on some of them but not others. And in general, benchmarks don't mean anything without context. This article has very little insight and has quite bad presentation.

iand675 14y ago
Another wrong issue in the article is that Haskell was not created with the intent of it being a general purpose programming language.

nullc 14y ago

C not for applications? (or LISP for that matter) A little bias showing there.

muuh-gnu 14y ago
Not only bias, but obviously pure ignorance too, at least with respect to Lisp. In his table, Lisp seems to be unsuitable both for meta programming and multiple dispatch, which always have been touted as Lisp's major features.
- reeses 14y ago
  It's apparently not aspect-oriented, either. The article is full of wrong information, wrong logic, and wrong conclusions. I feel embarrassed for the author, who must have spent a lot of time to produce something that is an intellectual net loss for anyone who reads it.
tater 14y ago
Same for Objective-C. I disregarded the entire blog post as soon as I noticed.

monkeyfacebag 14y ago

There is no single best language. Instead, what you get from any sufficiently good programming language is a series of tradeoffs. Haskell, for example, provides the benefits of pure functions (lazy evaluation, composable memory transactions, ability to reason about code) but in so doing it takes away your ability to arbitrarily mutate state and perform IO. That's a tradeoff. Python provides a clean, easily readable syntax that leverages whitespace. But you can't define multi-line lambdas. That's a tradeoff. Most of the languages on the author's list use garbage collection, yet another trade off. Importantly, it is nigh on impossible to understand the pros and cons of these tradeoffs unless you learn the language first. So get a dart board out and pick a language at random. Learn it well enough to find things you don't like about it. Then learn another language that fixes the problems you had with the first and figure out what you don't like about that language. And so on. Also, be aware that this process will never, ever end. Because there is no single best language. Except Haskell ;)

DanWaterworth 14y ago
Haskell is by no means perfect. You should try learning a dependently typed language like Agda or Idris in order to understand some of its flaws.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  > You should try learning a dependently typed language like Agda or Idris in order to understand some of its flaws. Why not just try something a bit more mainstream like COQ?
  - DanWaterworth 14y ago
    Coq is also a good choice. Coming from Haskell, though, I think Agda/Idris have a shallower learning curve. It also sits more happily on the theorem proving side of things than the programming side.
vorg 14y ago
> it is nigh on impossible to understand the pros and cons of these tradeoffs unless you learn the language first That's because there's virtually no easily accessible objective material decision-makers can use to select between them. Because of the high financial stakes involved, every company and consultant has an interest in promoting their own language memes in businesses, government, universities and schools.

notb 14y ago

I don't understand these questions: “Is optimization of speed premature while productivity languishes?”; “Are semantic elegance and lexical simplicity just means by which to further our productive capacity?” The flowery language is confusing me. Is there any real content here? I've never heard anyone talk about programming languages like this. Writing like this just makes it harder to understand and seems like putting on airs

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

vxNsr 14y ago

The graphs seem to imply that functionality wise C# is the best choice.... I don't know much about languages but if that's true I wonder why it's not taught more often in schools, most classes I've seen are either for java or c++, and then assembly and matlab

doktrin 14y ago
The case could be made that universities teaching Java are already catering too much to industry. For my part, I would vastly prefer working with a lisp, ML or other esoteric language while in school. There's no shortage of time afterwards to work with more pragmatic languages & frameworks. edit : not meant to imply that Lisp or Ocaml are not "pragmatic", just that the likelihood of working with them as a professional developer are substantially lower than Java / C# or Ruby / Python.
- yuushi 14y ago
  Why does it have to be limited to a single language at all? Exposure to multiple languages should be the norm.
macspoofing 14y ago
It actually is taught in many schools.
samirahmed 14y ago
C# does fit many needs and molds and could be used as general purpose language of instruction. However decisions are seldom made on how 'good' a language is. Java, C++ have plenty of free, multi-platform tooling and resources. C# requires lots of (hard to get or costly) Microsoft products and tooling like Visual Studio. C/C++ has the additionally advantage that students are exposed to memory management issues. Not to mention that C/C++ and Java are the top 3 languages on the KIOBE index and have been for the last decade. C# is newer than all three has risen in popularity over the last decade. Matlab is much higher level language, usually targeted at (non computer) engineering disciplines because its is easier to learn, and provides lots of tools and libraries for simulation/computation/statistics.

agentultra 14y ago

Analysis paralysis! The computer is a machine. It understands one language. Everything else is sugar on top. The language you should choose is the one that exists at the right level of abstraction for the problem you're trying to solve. That's a very academic way of saying, "choose the right tool for the job." Personally I'm of the opinion that you can get really far knowing C and Common Lisp. They represent two fundamentally different models of computation and all of the other languages (save the Smalltalk offshoots and obscure ones I haven't had the pleasure of experimenting with yet) are essentially sub-sets of functionality from one or both of these two languages. It's too easy to get caught up in the "feature creep," of all of the languages available today. Some will claim "immutability by default," is a feature. It's not. Any sufficiently sophisticated evaluator of a language can stratify a program into a process capable of emulating a machine that can treat all memory as "immutable by default." It's important to remember that often these languages are created to solve a specific problem and then evolve over time to become more general. It is best, in my experience, to just go straight to the source and work down to what you need.

rdtsc 14y ago
> Personally I'm of the opinion that you can get really far knowing C and Common Lisp. Yup. I advocate a fast running & low level language like C plus a quick to get started with lots of libraries language like Python. At the end of the day, unless pure algorithms are the deliverables (and it may very well be), it is really about the libraries and ecosystem. In the majority of cases, it is simplest to re-use code someone already wrote. Who cares if this language compiles to assembler and is super functional and does all kinds of fancy tricks, can it read from Postgres or talk to RabbitMQ? Does it have an easy way to parse JSON or generate uuid's, or do I have to now spend time writing db drivers, json parsers before even starting on the real problem?
- cpprototypes 14y ago
  I agree that it's enough to know well one low level (or medium level) language and one high level language. For me, I decided a while ago that the two languages will be Java and Javascript. It was an easy decision since I use those languages at work, they both have healthy and growing ecosystems, and active communities.

richardjordan 14y ago

I suspect like a lot of people who came late to programming my choice was initially dictated by simple pragmatic concerns: What can I learn quickly? ...that has a fairly simple forgiving syntax ...that has a ton of online help and resources ...that I can get a prototype product out simply with ...etc - I think it's a not atypical set of concerns. For me, because of all the online help and community and ease of getting something useful working quickly I landed on ruby, at first using rails. My analysis may have been simpler than the OP but as I learned more I was able to understand more of what I needed, where my choices were good, where not. I was able to pick up other tools and languages as my interest was piqued. So no one choice is right for everyone but this approach worked for me, but more than anything the key is to drop the analysis and learn SOMETHING ...once you start it's easier to pick up more.

fleitz 14y ago

Seriously how many people here write programs to solve k-means or n-body problems? Who fucking cares how many lines of code it takes to write k-means, and who fucking cares how long it takes to execute or how much memory it consumes. Most of us write software that moves bits from an API or DB to a screen. If we're lucky we translate a couple of those values to a color or something. Why are benchmarks so focused on code no one writes? How many successful YC companies aren't CRUD apps? Type the problem you have into google, write your stuff in the language that has the most concise stackoverflow answers on how to solve that problem.

samirahmed 14y ago
I somewhat agree. Choosing a programming language involves only a part of the factors listed here (speed, memory, paradigm) but also community, resources, development time and available framework, tooling and libraries. It is hard to quantify those through and stackoverflow posts and github repos are an insufficient metric
- fleitz 14y ago
  Fully agree, I like the Twitter/Facebook model, write the whole thing in a god awful 'slow' language that's quick to get code out the door, then rewrite in much 'faster' languages once the feature set solidifies.
rdtsc 14y ago
Exactly. Language Benchmark is probably the most useless and counter-productive place to start talking about language and platform comparison.
- banachtarski 14y ago
  This is a bit exaggerated right? When you buy a car, you aren't racing with it, but the amount of time it goes to 60 mph still matters, even if you're looking for fuel efficiency or something else.
  - 14y ago

just2n 14y ago

The grids comparing language features are mostly incorrect, generally towards a stereotype that's common but incorrect, or very dated.

vorg 14y ago

The RedMonk chart measures language popularity by activity on GitHub and StackOverflow. Top business languages Cobol, Transact-SQL, and PL/SQL aren't included at all in the 84 languages listed so the popularity measurement criteria is flawed. The Redmonk measurement also seems to be gamed because the second cluster in the chart includes some languages with backers who are heavily promoting the popularity of the language, including using Stack Overflow as their primary documentation effort and creating numerous shell projects on Github.

terhechte 14y ago

I write Python & Objective-C most of the day, used to work for several years in a PHP/JS shop and have to code in Ruby and/or C from time to time. I recently felt the urge to learn a new language which is distinctly different from what I know so that I can learn new things. I considered Erlang, Common Lisp, Clojure, Go, Haskell, Scala and Elixir. I plan to use it for server side web development and if possible for command line scripting (where I currently oftentimes use Python). After much back and forth I ended up having to decided between Clojure, Erlang or Scala. I then went with Scala because it seemed to offer the best of both worlds: It has a good actor library with Akka, it has macro support, it is functional, it offers good OOP support (to ease the transition for me), and as a boon it also allows to develop for Android, something I may want to tackle in the future. So far I'm really happy. The only downsides are that the REPL starts up pretty slow (I'm used to Python, which starts up way faster), and package installation (especially of Java packages) confuses me at times. I still may want to go to Clojure or Common Lisp from here, but right now I'm happy with my choice.

Nick_C 14y ago
> Scala... REPL starts up pretty slow. I wonder if your setup is faulty. My Scala REPL takes a couple of seconds to start. Admittedly longer than Python's, but not enough to worry about it. I'm on an old clunker laptop too. Also, you may be interested in this course on Functional Programming in Scala run by Martin Odersky himself. It started last week. https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
- happy_dino 13y ago
  I'd say that this sounds pretty too slow, too. My REPL starts in less than a second.

dbbolton 14y ago

I'm pretty curious as to how the author came up with the answers in that quiz.

malodyets 14y ago

How does a non-programmer write a guide to programming languages that has any value? Full of errors and misinformation gleaned from far too many hours reading websites and far too few hours writing code.