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Ask HN: What is your favourite unpopular programming language?
I'm specifically gearing this toward obscure languages -- in other words, not PHP and Java, because although nearly everybody hates those languages, nearly everybody knows them too. Languages with bad reputations that are no longer common count, though (like COBOL and FORTRAN).
Mine's prolog.
- aqsis 12y agoSmalltalk - the granddaddy of all object oriented languages, and still the 'most' object oriented IMHO. And the only language that I know of that is typically implemented in a system that offers image based persistence, which is very cool (again IMHO).
- pinewurst 12y agoTcl
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- lgunsch 12y agoI really like Rust. I suppose its debatable whether it's unpopular, as Rust focused articles on HN tend to be up-voted. But, it does seem "unpopular" compared to Go, and other languages with a much larger following.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoThe most fun I had coding in recent years was writing a couple simple games to run on an Atari 2600 emulator. All kinds of hoops to jump through to get stuff on the screen, but somehow all the effort just made it more fun. I should do some more of that. Solid intro tutorial here - http://www.atariage.com/2600/programming/2600_101/ http://www.atariage.com/2600/programming/2600_101/
- zck 12y agoArc - the Lisp that runs Hacker News. It's a really cleanly-designed language. While it has rough edges, the problems with it seem to be things it doesn't do, not things it does for confusing reasons.
- AnimalMuppet 12y agoPerl, unless you think it's still too popular to count. If not Perl, maybe 68000 assembler.
- enkiv2 12y agoI wasn't sure whether to count perl. Ten years ago, I'd say perl fell into the same category as PHP and Java -- a large user base, many of whom dislike it. But, it's transitioning toward being a language of the past.
- hanumantmk 12y agoPerl probably counts. For newer developers, I feel like even the linenoise/write once jokes are pretty much unknown. For an older set you still see one-liners and text heavy scripts, but no large players are really doing greenfield development in perl anymore. Which is a bit of a shame, because perl 5.20 is a pretty far cry from the 5.8 I was using those 10 years ago...
- yen223 12y agoI will always have a soft spot for ActionScript - it's what got me into programming in the first place.
- jophde 12y agoIf popularity is not measured in the sheer amount of code written or programmers, then I would have to say Java. It has to be the most publicly shamed language. It's not really the language itself I enjoy. It's IntelliJ. Seriously, IntelliJ makes writing Java code insanely fast.
- flippant 12y agoOn HN, I'd say that PHP is the most public shamed language. IntelliJ makes Scala a breeze too.
- AnimalMuppet 12y agoI second the love for IntelliJ. It's amazing. It's almost like being telepathic - you think and the code appears on the screen. And even Java... I've also had one problem made a fair amount simpler by Java's reflection, and a fair amount more simpler by Java's garbage collection. But I think Java is much to well-used to count as "unpopular".
- applecore 12y agoThe latest version of Eclipse IDE (Luna) is actually quite good and possibly better than IntelliJ for Java development.
- mahmud 12y agoHave you used Intellij? It's quite possibly the best software development tool ever made. Sometimes I just gawk at how polished it is. Intellij IDEA is simply amazing.
- enkiv2 12y ago> I'm specifically gearing this toward obscure languages -- in other words, not PHP and Java, because although nearly everybody hates those languages, nearly everybody knows them too. Languages with bad reputations that are no longer common count, though (like COBOL and FORTRAN). (From the OP)
- brudgers 12y agoJ is mind expanding.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y agoSo is datura.
- rwallace 12y agoF#. Beautiful language, clean and concise, encourages functional programming without mandating it, type inference gives the benefits of static typing without the boilerplate. And it's a .Net language so you have the full .Net ecosystem, eliminating most of the disadvantages of using a minority language.
- IndianAstronaut 12y agoI am actually playing with F# quite a bit. It is definitely forcing me to rethink the way I am setting up my C# applications.
- cstoner 12y agoI really dug ocaml. I'm glad that F# has at least some actual usage out there.
- xkcd-sucks 12y agomathematica and/or the ＂wolfram language" proprierary and slow (bad) but it has a huge, convenient, well documented standard library so it's convenient for prototyping stuff plus it's really satisfying to implement complicated thing in a single line of code
- yetihehe 12y agoAmos (my first programming language), Euphoria (It's nice), Erlang (when you understand the erlang way, you seek it in all the rest of languages, something like with lisp).
- circuitslave 12y agoRexx - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx
- Randgalt 12y agoJava
- Lowgain 12y agoDuring the programming languages course on Coursera they focused on SML for the first few weeks - while I haven't done too much with it outside of that course I really liked it
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cmwelsh 12y agoLua is pretty nice. Great memory footprint, easy to embed, and you can use LuaJIT if you want to trade extra memory usage for extra speed. The best integration so far is probably Nginx: https://blog.cloudflare.com/pushing-nginx-to-its-limit-with-lua/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/pushing-nginx-to-its-limit-with-...
- Lasher 12y agoWe implemented Lua as the quest / NPC scripting language within a "C" based MUD engine and the performance has been incredible. Tens of thousands of individual programs and not a blip, game pulses smooth as ever 8 times a second.
- colanderman 12y agoProlog. Extraordinarily simple model (you can implement an interpreter in a few hundred lines of code); yet extraordinarily powerful for solving many kinds of discrete-math (e.g. parsing, graph theory) problems.
- partisan 12y agoI am burning a candle for Nim, formerly Nimrod. I like the brevity of the code I write using the language. I feel it has very few drawbacks, but I wish there were more of a community around it.
- bdcravens 12y agoCFML (language behind ColdFusion and open-source variants). Very approachable by beginners. Web console by default, no need to jack with config files. No database connection strings or convoluted models, just put SQL in <cfquery> and get a recordset. Simple data structure. Ease of HTML syntax, but power of c-like scripting if you want it. Backed by JVM, so can extend it in all the ways you'd imagine, and can also write extensions in CFML if you'd like. I do mostly Ruby these days, but I spent a long time doing CFML, so I'll always be fond of it.
- pmdulaney 12y agoI like PostScript. When you want absolute control over a vector image, it's the way to go, and if you set up your macros right (that is "procedures") it can be quite easy to modify and reuse.
- serve_yay 12y agoJavaScript :) (Just because a lot of people use it, doesn't make it popular!)
- sjolsen 12y agoAgda; it marries formal mathematics and programming in a very satisfying way. I can't wait to see what comes of it and other intuitionistic type theory–based systems.
- duncantuna 12y agoNet.Data
- justintbassett 12y agoVBA. It's nice to be able to write somebody an excel macro that they can run without having to install anything. Sue me.
- LetBinding 12y agoBrainfuck. Because it's fun. My favorite Brainfuck interpreters. http://brainfuck.tk http://brainfuck.tk http://copy.sh/brainfuck/ http://copy.sh/brainfuck/ http://www.iamcal.com/misc/bf_debug/ http://www.iamcal.com/misc/bf_debug/ This is a good IDE for Brainfuck. http://4mhz.de/bfdev.html http://4mhz.de/bfdev.html If you are interested, you can contribute to this Brainfuck compiler optimization project. http://www.nayuki.io/page/optimizing-brainfuck-compiler http://www.nayuki.io/page/optimizing-brainfuck-compiler
- jupp0r 12y agoElixir, it combines Ruby-like syntactic sugar with Erlangs powerful OTP libraries and distributed systems mojo!
- auganov 12y agoHaha, I scanned all the comments to see if someone said prolog just to figure out that the OP did :D It's prolog for me too. Or I guess logic programming in general, but prolog is the main standalone one. I really hope clojure's core.logic takes off.
- mahmud 12y agoMozart/Oz. Such a beautiful language and system; except the syntax, dynamic typing & sophomoric runtime ;-) There is nothing like Oz. I spent 2 of my best years just studying its research papers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tluyben2 12y agoShen. Love it because it's small, easy to implement, nice to optimize and I have a real weakness for small implementations, Prolog and Lisp. Edit: I really like Mercury [1] but the implementation is so crazy large and complex that I stopped pursuing it. While it's so lovely. I just try to use what I learnt from Mercury in optimising my Shen implementation. [1] https://mercurylang.org/about.html https://mercurylang.org/about.html
- LarryMade2 12y agoFoxBase+/Mac - so very versatile for an 80s database language.
- brickcap 12y agoMine's erlang.