Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!
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On 2021-05-05, Mhj <genyaarikado@comcast.net> wrote:

Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!

You should program in C to learn to work closely with the machine,
understand its ins and outs, optimize, go fast, break things horribly
and learn to correct them. It will help you understand what's good and
bad about other more abstracted languages.

Then you should code in Lisp so you learn to rewrite your brain and the
way you think about problems. You'll see elegance all around you and
gain appreciation for an entirely new way of seeing problems and
solutions.

Then you should code in Python because it's quick to bang out a
solution, easy to read, filled with 10,000,000 packages that already do
what you want, and just plain good enough for most jobs.
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C is the portable Assembler now.
It'll stay here for many more decades.

Forget things that are alredy oxydised @release time.
;-Þ
--
Take Back Control! — Mesh The Planet!
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On 2021-05-05, Mhj <genyaarikado@comcast.net> wrote:

Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!

C.


Disclaimer: I don't know Lisp. I've played enough with
Haskell, Erlang and OCaml to understand why it is important
to open your mind with functional programming. Once the
mind is open, you're ready to get back. With this I'm not
saying that there's no good project written in a functional
language, but I think that there's a restrict set of
problems where a functional language provides the right
tool.


Python? It is definitely useful to prototype things, and
reach some result very quicly. Excellent when performance
is far from being critical, and you want to spare some time.
If the project grows beyond a certain threshold, however, it
turns as quickly into a very special hell. The dynamism of
the language will now be your enemy, and type annotations
will turn out to be false friends.


C is solid, is simple, is for the enlightened. Sure thing:
if you got fooled with the typing of Python, you will
totally be fooled by `void *`, but if you know C won't fear
it. You can literally keep the language specification in
mind. The minimalism of the language will bring minimalism
to the code base, and you're now one with the Unix.
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On 2021-05-05, Mhj <genyaarikado@comcast.net> wrote:

Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!

Ah, time to show my very special bias!!!
(Come on people, how could this thread be objective?)


C.


Disclaimer: I don't know Lisp. I've played enough with
Haskell, Erlang and OCaml to understand why it is important
to open your mind with functional programming. Once the
mind is open, you're ready to get back. With this I'm not
saying that there's no good project written in a functional
language, but I think that there's a restrict set of
problems where a functional language provides the right
tool.


Python? It is definitely useful to prototype things, and
reach some result very quicly. Excellent when performance
is far from being critical, and you want to spare some time.
If the project grows beyond a certain threshold, however, it
turns as quickly into a very special hell. The dynamism of
the language will now be your enemy, and type annotations
will turn out to be false friends.


C is solid, is simple, is for the enlightened. Sure thing:
if you got fooled with the typing of Python, you will
totally be fooled by `void *`, but if you know C won't fear
it. You can literally keep the language specification in
mind. The minimalism of the language will bring minimalism
to the code base, and you're now one with the Unix.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Dacav Doe <dacav@tilde.institute> writes:

C is solid, is simple, is for the enlightened. Sure thing:
if you got fooled with the typing of Python, you will
totally be fooled by `void *`, but if you know C won't fear
it. You can literally keep the language specification in
mind. The minimalism of the language will bring minimalism
to the code base, and you're now one with the Unix.

And on easter and xmas, hack a bit in B. o;-)
--
Take Back Control! — Mesh The Planet!
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On 2021-05-05, Mhj <genyaarikado@comcast.net> wrote:

Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!

I'm always one for "best tool for the task" so I'm not going to tell anyone else
what to use!

C - it is the foundation of so much. It is really difficult to understand the workings of software / the machine at a deep level without knowing and being familiar with C. "use-after-free", the syscall interface, etc. are all so important. I have programmed in C professionally off and on. That said, C is a
language with dragons and I don't really prefer it now. Rust would be the more modern language in this category.

Lisp - As with C, it is a somewhat dated language in a sense, but a fascinating one. Who would have guessed that Lisp was one of the very earliest languages? It has inspired so many functional languages since, if not in syntax then in spirit. I use it in Emacs, of course. Its legacy lives on in things like Haskell.

Python - Of the interpreted languages, I tend to prefer it to Perl or Ruby. The
latter have quite a few weird surprises. However, I'm not entirely happy with Python 3; in fact, it has quite a few pretty serious pathologies with non-UTF-8 filename on POSIX. I wrote about that at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10063-the-fundamental-problem-in-python-3

So I'm going to add to the list --

Rust - I have really appreciated this language. It is as close to the machine as C, or very nearly so (certainly closer than Go). It doesn't have garbage collection, nor reference counting by default, but does have automatic memory management -- statically, even! -- through its borrow checker. Its type system is descended from Haskell's, and is rich and expressive with type inference. The library of software available for it is also substantial. On the downside, it's a higher learning curve than, say, Python, for most, and compile (though not run) times can be slow.

Haskell - What can I say, it slices and dices functions like Perl does strings. A unique language that has a lot going for it - and also some pitfalls if you haven't wrapped your head around it.

- John
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On 9/7/21 8:48 PM, John Goerzen wrote:

On 2021-05-05, Mhj <genyaarikado@comcast.net> wrote:

Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!

[...]

Rust - I have really appreciated this language. It is as close to the machine
as C, or very nearly so (certainly closer than Go). It doesn't have garbage collection, nor reference counting by default, but does have automatic memory management -- statically, even! -- through its borrow checker. Its type system
is descended from Haskell's, and is rich and expressive with type inference. The library of software available for it is also substantial. On the downside,
it's a higher learning curve than, say, Python, for most, and compile (though not run) times can be slow.

Haskell - What can I say, it slices and dices functions like Perl does strings.
A unique language that has a lot going for it - and also some pitfalls if you haven't wrapped your head around it.

- John

+1 for Rust! I love how it's memory safe, yet still feels like a low
level language.
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On 2021-09-11, Prisonpotato <prisonpotato@tilde.team> wrote:

+1 for Rust! I love how it's memory safe, yet still feels like a low
level language.

Yes, exactly. It is an intriguing mix of having an amazing type system and memory safety, and yet still being a low-level language. Sort of a cross between C and Haskell, and comes out looking really good.

- John
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On Tue, 4 May 2021 23:27:11 -0400
Mhj <genyaarikado@comcast.net> wrote:

Choose your favorite and argue as to why people should program in them!

Nobody is going to toil those stupid parentheses. Please, don┤t. I
hate those [l]aughable, [i]rritating, [s]tupid [p]arentheses. Let┤s
write a compiler in C. A good one. It should support first-class
functions, of course. It should come with a garbage collector. It
should have two namespaces. Lol. It should have macros, of course.
But we have macros in C, so we┤re half-way done already.
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