What’s the most underrated programming language that’s not getting enough love?

Posted by imKiLoX@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 417 comments

I keep hearing about Python and JavaScript, but what about the less popular languages? What’s your hidden gem and why do you love it?

Reply to Post

Reply

417 Comments

[-]

Clutch55555@reddit

VBA. Excel is efficient and easy gui. You can write real code and send to anyone that has excel with no install bs.

Reply

[-]

Left_Somewhere_4188@reddit

Please please please don't give my manager any ideas. Google Sheet is about a 100x better at the stuff that you should do with a spreadsheet. If Excel dissapeared from the world, there would be some major problems for a bit, and then the world would be so much more beautiful. Yeah, it allows you to do a lot of stuff. Most of which you should absolutely never do in Excel. It's ungodly, it's slow, it's unreliable. Don't even let me started on it's online implementation. You write VBA, great! Now if you have a company even remotely large size you'd export that file to it's online version. Surprise! VBA DOESN"T WORK ON THE ONLINE VERSION OF EXCEL. YOU SUDDENLY HAVE TO REWRITE EVERYTHING IN TYPESCRIPT. There's in reality such a narrow range of uses for Excel, unless you're a mom and pop's shop.

Reply

[-]

inarchetype@reddit

I don't know sheet well. Is there a vba equivalent for scripting/programming/macros in sheets?

Reply

[-]

Left_Somewhere_4188@reddit

Yeah there's AppScript which is JavaScript, you can use the whole Google ecosystem, run scheduled tasks, such as updating tables in BigQuery, you can deploy simple apps and use Sheets as conditions in your scripts without having to open them etc. So there are actually some real-world applications there that don't have a straightforward "better" way. For example all our financial reporting is based on what the CFO updates a sheet with. It doesn't touch production at all and is easy for him to do through a phone after he signs a contract lol. Our dashboards and reports and alerts etc. are updated with the new values. But for a lot of other things, I just don't think Spreadsheets are the right tool, and this is generally any time you'd go for scripting. Exploratory Analysis? Use notebook with Python or SQL . Accounting/finance? Use SAP or an inhouse service. Database? Use a SQL database. Visualization? Use Power BI/ Tableau. Yeah some companies literally run on an Excel file, that's not "wow Excel is amazing" that's "wow people are r-slurred". Like yeah you can make a video-game in Excel, but it makes no fucking sense to do that when there are so many better ways to build a video-game. But if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. And some managers, I swear to god, think that tools other than a hammer are a conspiracy.

Reply

[-]

inarchetype@reddit

> Exploratory Analysis? Use notebook with Python or SQL . . Well yeah, I'm personally of the 'I don't care about vba or advanced spreadsheet features because anything that involved, or more data than I can easily see on a screen or two should be done in R" school. But in the real world we have to work with people, especially in the administrative/accounting/finance side, who think and work in spreadsheets and whose workflow needs to be in spreadsheets because it's what they know, even if it is an awful kludgey, and we have to report to people sometimes who want to see spreadsheets.

Reply

[-]

Left_Somewhere_4188@reddit

I mean the final report can totally be exported to an Excel file format. That's what I do as well. That's also just my main use of Excel, information exchange in tabular format

Reply

[-]

Haplo12345@reddit

Is this comment satire? It's literally the opposite of reality.

Reply

[-]

Clutch55555@reddit

I worked in a large financial institution. It runs off excel. I have a comp sci degree and know what i’m doing. VBA was waaay better than waiting on IT bureaucracy for years to make some hot garbage in java.

Reply

[-]

pythosynthesis@reddit

VBA gets my vote as well. I've long argued you can do serious (office) work with VBA + attached Excel GUI. I'll go even further. Some huge chunk of world economy runs on Excel, which is the front end for virtually all office work. A VBA consultancy to automate such tasks has been on my mind for some time...

Reply

[-]

EODdoUbleU@reddit

I wrote a pretty extensive Ops app in Access with VBA due to software restrictions. Took about 2.5 hours of daily morning work down to about 10-15 minutes. I left, Office updated, DB broke, they moved back to 40k+ line Excel docs with... VBA is cool, but relying on it is putting the foot-gun on an egg timer.

Reply

[-]

pythosynthesis@reddit

No, no... This is where th consultancy idea comes in. They upgrade, everything breaks down, you get repeated business ;-) It's up to them to decide how to go. 40k rows of Excel that breaks all the time or paying me to fix it every now and then. They get to pick what's cheaper. I had this idea after seeing the same 100Mb+ Excel sheet copied and pasted every day, date changed, new data copied into it and then F9. Because no one had any idea of how it really worked. When it came time to save that giant blob, it would outright crash ~10% of the time, so my buddies had to stay behind and redo everything again because you need to leave your work saved for audit. The rest of us, devs, were merrily drinking.

Reply

[-]

EODdoUbleU@reddit

I would've loved to go back on to maintain it, plus a couple other apps that were in the same boat, but the DoD doesn't really do that. If I was able to go back, I would've advocated for an actual tech stack instead of the hacky mess I came up with.

Reply

[-]

nikfp@reddit

I started playing with Elixir about 9 months ago and now I'm using it for all kinds of things. It's been a great language to work with. Just a few things I really like about it are: * It's a functional language. The paradigm really sits well with me and has helped me better structure Javascript and Typescript code that I've written since. And it's not as "Academic" or "Rigorous" as other functional languages so it doesn't hinder my thinking with trying to make some arcane type system happy. It's just productive. * The syntax is clean and easy to read, and when you build things up from smaller functions it tends to read closer to natural language than anything else I've used. * It has pattern matching, but it's more than just "it has it". The whole language is built around it and that means you can do very expressive and precise things with it. * It runs on the BEAM virtual machine which is 3 decades in to being probably the most fault tolerant and highly concurrent runtime available. Things like distribution and crash recovery are trivial and treated as first class concepts of the runtime and ecosystem * Performance is on par with well structured Java or C# * The Phoenix web framework with Liveview is phenomenal. I've never been so productive in full stack as I am using Phoenix. And a lot of things that were hard to near impossible in other languages and frameworks are almost trivial in Phoenix, like PubSub which is built right in. Because of the way the VM works underneath it all, connecting things for realtime is obscenely easy. It does have a smaller community though, so support isn't as widespread as you would find in Python or Javascript. That hasn't really been an issue for me yet though, I find the official discord server and certain AI tools to be very helpful in understanding and writing Elixir code. Also I've seen it mentioned that it might not be an ideal "first" language, and I'm too far along to comment on that. But to be honest, I can't believe it isn't more popular than it already is.

Reply

[-]

dandmcd@reddit

> I can't believe it isn't more popular than it already is. Hard to convince any middle managers to use a new language when Javascript and php devs are a dime a dozen. Unless it fills an important niche, it's hard for a language to take off when developers have to be trained on it. Looks very interesting though, the Phoenix framework is intriguing, and worth spending a weekend toying with.

Reply

[-]

nikfp@reddit

That's one thing people in the community talk about often. The counterpoint is that Elixir allows smaller teams to get more done, which has been shown in use cases like WhatsApp and their growth to Unicorn status with a team of 50 engineers. It's also the central language in the chat infrastructure of Discord. Per their team: >Overall, Discord’s communication runs at impressive numbers. They have crossed more than 12 million concurrent users across all servers, with more than 26 million WebSocket events to clients per second, and Elixir is powering all of this. It's a not so well kept secret in Elixir teams that smaller teams can get more done. A big part of that is that elixir code tends to fight you when you get out of the pit of success, so you tend to write code that is idiomatic, and the next person to look at it generally can understand it much quicker. So working on teams doesn't equate to very different styles of code in different parts of a codebase like it can in JS and PHP. Much less fragmentation overall. Then you get to scaling and the BEAM vm is ready to go. Need to scale up capacity? Start a second machine and run pubsub between the two instances and they operate as one unit. And it's all built in. It's still a hard sell, but also very hard to ignore when you start looking at who's using it and how. If you are interested, [case studies abound here.](https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html)

Reply

[-]

inarchetype@reddit

The common lisp guys used to say the same things though. But when lisp startups scaled up/IPO/got acquired they all seemed to rewrite in something else mostly due to needing a more liquid labor market for devs. The kind of thing where you can get five very smart guys who can do magic with it, but when you need 100 average guys you are sol because you can't find 20 guys in your market who knows the tech, and average guys can't get their head around the paradigm anyway Is that goingt to be the story with elixir as well?

Reply

[-]

fluffball23@reddit

ehat is it primarily used for ? like for python we know data science backrnd django flask etc

Reply

[-]

nikfp@reddit

Given that it runs on the BEAM vm and concurrency and fault tolerance are first class concepts, it's excellent on the back end for anything distributed and concurrent, and really anything that doesn't need C or Rust level performance. And the language is built to be extendable from within itself so it can be extended to fit nearly any domain well. It also does well at Data Science and can make use of the same native libraries that Python uses for the processing part through the use of Erlang NIFs. (Natively Implemented Functions) There is also a great IoT and embedded story with Nerves And for HTTP servers and web applications, the functional paradigm is a natural fit, and the concurrency and distribution model double down on that. Add Phoenix and it's just an outstanding way to build web services and applications. It's almost easier to outline what it's not strong with, which would be things like native level graphics rendering and other high CPU and GPU demand tasks. Again NIFs can get you far but a true end to end C program will still be remarkably faster.

Reply

[-]

ScrimpyCat@reddit

Been using it (non-professionally) since late 2013 (was using Erlang before that), there’s always been some interest there but it’s never really taken off in a large way and I think that’s kind of to be expected. There’s always a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to adopting new languages, not many developers will pick something up if there aren’t opportunities for it, while a lot of businesses are deterred from adopting it if there isn’t the pool of talent to hire from. Some languages are able to get around that due to having a large backing so they can generate demand/opportunities themselves, or even push it onto other businesses (force adoption). But Elixir has neither of things. > Performance is on par with well structured Java or C# Depends on what you’re doing. For a lot of heavy processing tasks you’re still looking at doing them externally (either through a NIF or port) or a library like Nx that will handle the external faster path for you. However due to the BEAM’s concurrency model and scheduler, it does have the benefit of being able to weather the effects of performance issues better. As your app can still remain responsive to other requests. > Also I’ve seen it mentioned that it might not be an ideal “first” language, and I’m too far along to comment on that. The reason for that is because of the lack of opportunities that exist for entry level. Since companies have typically focused on hiring those with prior experience (in other languages), as opposed to hiring newbies and training them up. Things have gotten better overtime but the opportunities for entry level are still quite limited (even before this current market). While one might think, but there’s less competition for those positions, and they would be right, landing a job is not just about being better than whoever else applies. So if every company decides that you’re not what they’re looking for you could easily find that you’ve run out of jobs to apply for. And the frequency at which new jobs will come up will also be slow.

Reply

[-]

Rarelyimportant@reddit

It's certainly not going to win many awards for pure crunching, CPU bound tasks, but as you say, it's generally quite easy to write that stuff as a NIF, and with Rustler the risks previously involved are mostly non-existant. The first time I dove into Rust/Rustler, I was able to wrap a Rust 3rd party crate in probably a day. Certainly it wasn't anything ground breaking, but it's really quite approachable even with little to no knowledge(wrapping something that is, writing your own NIF logic would probably be wise to get a better grasp on Rust) The BEAM real strong suit is the ability to quickly get something running that can do pretty massive scale coordination, request handling, etc. Basically anything except heavy number crunching. The other thing that I always heard Erlang/beam were really bad at, but I actually think it does incredibly well is string processing. Having access to binaries and charlists can be incredibly useful in different scenarios, and the ability to pattern match is really nice. Something that's actually quite a bit more ugly that one might first assume is doing large replacements of strings. For example transliterating language scripts. You're either stuck having to slice multiple different sized chunks off the string, or having to use regex which can quickly get slow. I'm not sure of any language that makes that quite as easy as it is to implement in the BEAM, and at quite impressive speeds considering you're writing it in a high level language. Stuff like protocol message parsing. Custom binary formats. etc. The Beam + Elixir macros is really quite a joy to work with. Especially for something that can so quickly become spaghetti like string processing.

Reply

[-]

ScrimpyCat@reddit

Tbf that common “bad string handling” complaint is to do with Erlang due to their use of charlists as the default string type. Charlists do have some nice properties that can be useful in certain circumstances, but as a default string type it was a poor choice IMO (cumbersome and inefficient for many use cases). Elixir however went with binaries, they also have a pretty good string library, so I’ve not heard that same complaint. That said there still are some gotchas like with how memory is managed for binaries (references), or Elixir’s default way of displaying charlists (often see newcomers get confused why their list is being displayed as some random string of characters all of a sudden). But for the most part working with strings is a lot more conventional now. But yeh pattern matching binary data is so powerful and such an expressive way to handle it. There’s many times I’ll just opt for using Elixir for some random tool just because of that.

Reply

[-]

Rarelyimportant@reddit

Yeah, I could definitely see charlists only being a real headache, but I think it's actually really helpful to have a tool that's available. I don't think I would even know what a char/codepoint is if it weren't for me trying to demystify the strange string vs charlist phenomena when first getting into Elixir many years ago. It never quite clicked until one times I was doing some analysis on a string in Elixir, but sending the analysis(ranges mostly) to a front-end in JS and Swift. Not only was the bug incredibly hard to find, but when I then saw that depending on which system and what function, the string `"👨‍👩‍👧‍👦"` was seemingly at the same time had lengths of: `1`, `7`, `11`, and `25`. And for a brief, fleeting moment, I thought I had finally found a bug where the computer was wrong and not me...nope...computer wasn't wrong. But I do now appreciate the complexities of strings, and I'm damn glad charlists are at arms reach in Elixir because they're certainly not what you want most of the time, but sometimes they're just exactly what you need.

Reply

[-]

ScrimpyCat@reddit

Erlang still had binary strings, just that charlists were the default string type. That meant that often any of the standard libraries that expected strings expected charlists as opposed to binary strings, so you’d have to convert them. It also meant that string helpers only worked with charlists, although this was later changed (later on they got rid of the old string module and replaced it with a much better one). So unless you went to the extra effort of working with binary strings then you’d just end up using the charlists. Unicode as a whole is just so incredibly complex. Almost even deceptively so as it starts off somewhat “simple” (e.g. ASCII compatibility with UTF-8, too easy! Then maybe having to deal with characters that have codepoints that require multiple code units, or handling multiple UTF encodings, bit trickier, still not so bad. Then it’s all the rest BOM, character widths, surrogates, combining characters, variation sequences, tags, etc. *cries*). Most programmers won’t even want to get into the weeds of it and yet they’ll still face so many gotchas like you mentioned. But things get so out of hand if you ever have to do stuff like make a renderer for them, I always end up just taking the easy way out and deciding I’m only going to have “partial” Unicode support lol.

Reply

[-]

Rarelyimportant@reddit

Yeah, you even left out Bidi! And the direction of text changing part of the way through a string. Some of the stuff I'm doing right now has required me to dive pretty deep into Unicode and font rendering. I say pretty deep, but that's only pretty deep compared on how deep the average person needs to dive, but compared to how deep it all goes i've only scratched the surface. I think if anything it's a huge validation of just what a success unicode has been in general. It just works. So much so that the average programmer really doesn't need to think about it unless their needs get to be more specific, but for the vast majority of use cases unicode does a fantastic job of taking all the vast complexity of text(not even getting into the complexity of rendering said text), and wraps it up in something so easy to use, that it will almost fool you into thinking it's all just that simple.

Reply

[-]

publicclassobject@reddit

Damn if I ever go back to web/backend I’ll need to give elixir a try. I always thought erlang sounded cool.

Reply

[-]

puppet_pals@reddit

> Performance is on par with well structured Java or C# One caveat, it has no first party O(1) insert/O(1) get data structure. Even map is a hash-mapped-trie, which is O(log32(n)) for both of these operations. For most people this doesn't matter, but I had to rewrite an app once due to it. Still love elixir though.

Reply

[-]

Mwahahahahahaha@reddit

I’d like to add that Gleam, another BEAM language that hit 1.0 recently, is also awesome and people should check it out.

Reply

[-]

robkw@reddit

I came here to say Elixir and was so glad to see it as the top answer. It’s been 4 1/2 years since I was in a job that used it and I still miss it dearly. It’s unbelievable how productive I felt with it almost immediately, and I can’t express how much I loved pattern matching. I did always feel like it was only a matter of time until I found myself having to recreate something really significant for which there was already a package in the JS ecosystem, but to be fair that day never actually came along.

Reply

[-]

DazzlingDifficulty70@reddit

Any resources you used for learning?

Reply

[-]

nikfp@reddit

Elixir School [https://elixirschool.com/en](https://elixirschool.com/en) is a great starting point. Also the official docs walk through a lot about the language starting at [https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.17.2/introduction.html](https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.17.2/introduction.html) and that's where I got going. And if you want a book, Pragmatic Bookshelf has some awesome books on Elixir.

Reply

[-]

DazzlingDifficulty70@reddit

Thanks <3

Reply

[-]

damnNamesAreTaken@reddit

Elixir is my favorite language. I've been working with it since 2018.

Reply

[-]

WilliamRails@reddit

I will take a look

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Mercury. Been using/learning it for about 4-5 years on and off, it is 3 years older than Haskell, and a mix of Prolog (logic programming) and Hakell, as it allows curring, higher order programming etc. It produces compiled C code or Java or C#, it is ROCK SOLID in terms of analysing your code and not letting you get away with even the smallest indiscretion. It has memory management for you, no pointers, I/O is way easier than Haskell. I did a rough proof of a video game with it, binding to Raylib with zero impedance, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmiv5a731V8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmiv5a731V8) DOCS [https://www.mercurylang.org](https://www.mercurylang.org) a crash course: as it says, not the best FIRST intro but it gives you an idea of its capabilities: [https://mercury-in.space/crash.html](https://mercury-in.space/crash.html)

Reply

[-]

SublateAnything@reddit

I found this comment after trying to see if you had uploaded your raylib bindings for mercury after I saw your game in the mercury mailing list. Are you willing to put your raylib bindings in it's own repository?

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

OK, enjoy! [https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-raylib](https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-raylib)

Reply

[-]

SublateAnything@reddit

Cool! Thank you so much!

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

I never thought about it, but yes, I can do that guess. It's deliberately a single file so it can be rolled into other Mercury projects I do. Gimme a day or so... I will post the URL back here.

Reply

[-]

SublateAnything@reddit

Something really cool about logic programming is that it it's easy to write in a way akin to ECS (entity-component-system). For example, something like this in mercury: ''' :- type entity ---> player; soup; cow. :- pred position(entity, int). % in frp, the out would be always(int) rather than int :- mode position(in, out). :- mode position(out, out). :- pred velocity(entity, int). % in frp, the out would be always(int) rather than int :- mode velocity(in, out). :- mode velocity(out, out). position(player, 0). velocity(player, 1). position(soup, 13). velocity(soup, 4). position(cow, 4). velocity(cow, 8). :- func move(entity) = int. :- mode move(out) = out is multi. move(Entity) = Pos + Vel :- position(Entity, Pos), velocity(Entity, Vel). '''

Reply

[-]

Grounds4TheSubstain@reddit

I love Prolog and functional programming, so Mercury seems natural. But, I read that there are no logic variables in Mercury? What does that mean in practice? Isn't everything a logic variable in Prolog?

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Found the tables thing! [https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury\_ref/Implementation\_002ddependent-extensions.html#Fact-tables](https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_ref/Implementation_002ddependent-extensions.html#Fact-tables)

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

I have no idea what that means. I wrote a version of my transpiler in SWI Prolog, in fact, my redis GNU Prolog code now lives in SWI(!) \[claim to nerd fame\], but what does "no logic variables" mean? No idea but it hasn't stopped me! [https://mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury\_trans\_guide/index.html](https://mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_trans_guide/index.html)

Reply

[-]

Grounds4TheSubstain@reddit

Is it cool if I DM you once I get my thoughts together? I have a large Prolog framework that represents abstract syntax trees as Prolog facts, to serve as a database for program analysis, but I'm unclear on some details about how I'd make the jump to Mercury.

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Also, I tried to find the docs on Mercury tabling (NOT the I/O tabling) of large amounts of data... the user group mailing list is superbly friendly and informative, most of the active Mercury compiler team are on it and, if you you know your Prolog history, \*the\* Richard O'Keefe is on it too, the of The Craft of Prolog book from way back.

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

More than happy to shoot the shit with a fellow hacker. I did something similar years ago when I first got into Prolog. I had this tool that scanned PHP code and produced a 'dot' file for GraphViz... I had joined a small company with a terrible code base so I juiced the code, produced a clickable SVG and then went further... I produced a shit tonne of facts about the code, not just inheritance but member variables, method signatures, names of variables etc etc PHP\_CodeSniffer was a great help IIRC... the end result was a whole bunch of facts and some predicates I wrote to then find out what called what etc etc it was more fun than the actual day job... one file was 8000+ lines of sprawling PHP code, I shit you not.

Reply

[-]

Lonke@reddit

>It produces compiled C code Hehe, that'd just be binary!

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Anything compiled is 'just binary', but yes, I get it. It also has the ability to link in plain C modules too, the FFI is so simple its laughable, only the FFO for GForth is on a par, and "J" for that matter.

Reply

[-]

TheReservedList@reddit

Anything not compiled is also just binary.

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Very insightful. There are 10 types of people...

Reply

[-]

dnswblzo@reddit

I haven't actually tried the language out myself, but I was just looking at the docs and the default compilation target is actually C source code (text at that point), and then the C gets compiled to machine language.

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Yes, its fast too, not just the compilation but apparently, because of the strictness of the compiler and the code you write, it can make lots of 'safe' assumptions about thing like referential integrity, auto-inlining small functions etc and the resulting application is very fast, for any definition of fast. That's part of the reason I wrote the video game, it gets 60FPS with ease, unthrottled by Raylib its way higher. I have barely scratched the surface of it I think, it's a very elegant language, the code isn't fussy about layout i.e. no ident rules etc like Python or Haskell; you are free to type the code as you see fit, whatever floats your boat. Mostly I use nano and a custom Mercury mode I created for syntax highlighting, but on heavy refactor days I used VScode as somebody wrote a syntax plugin for it. Some of my first projects were tools to help me learn the language, I wrote a 'stub generator' and a 'file watxcher' that can run an arbitrary command when a watched file changes. Oh, and a nano plugin that inserts compiler errors inline in the nano buffer. [https://github.com/emacstheviking/mcnew](https://github.com/emacstheviking/mcnew) [](https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-nano-mode) [https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-nano-mode](https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-nano-mode) [https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-pberr](https://github.com/emacstheviking/mercury-pberr)

Reply

[-]

dummie_dot@reddit

Lua. Similar to python, muchhh faster

Reply

[-]

Conscious-Ball8373@reddit

Ugh. Speed is literally the only thing to like about it though. How many elements are there in that array again? (Hint: `#t` is only the right answer _sometimes_).

Reply

[-]

Slimxshadyx@reddit

Are there any other real issues with that language other than the fact arrays start at 1?

Reply

[-]

Conscious-Ball8373@reddit

The problem isn't that arrays start at one. The problem is that whether `#t` gives you the right answer or not depends on how you've inserted items into the array. There is no way to tell if a key doesn't exist in a table or if it exists but has the value `nil`. So if you've typed a field name wrong (`let foo = t.flo` instead of `let foo = t.foo`) that's not an error until you try to invoke `foo()`. Oh, and globals are implemented as a table, so accessing an undefined global isn't an error. Locals are usually implemented as a table, too. But if you get it wrong, it assumes global rather than local, so your error affects _everything_. You can call class methods on unrelated instances. Because that's always useful. There is only one way to iterate over the elements in a table: `for k, v in pairs(t)`. There is no `map()`, `filter()` or `reduce()` in the standard library, nor will there ever be because suggesting such a thing is the sort of heresy that gets people burned at the stake. Writing your own is trivial, so everyone writes their own. Of course, not everyone finds all the bugs in their particular implementations and most people will use the same name for these fundamental operations, making code reuse a nightmare. There is an `ipairs(t)` builtin as well, which has all the same terrible defects as `#t`. All your function parameters are optional, whether you want them to be or not. There is no way to tell the difference between "no value was supplied for this parameter" and "the caller supplied the value `nil` for this parameter". Also, passing _too many_ function parameters is not an error. The extra parameter is just thrown away. `~` means "not" -- unless it's in a binary context, when it means "xor". Hope you got your parentheses right! If you want integer division, it's the `//` that starts a comment in a vast array of other languages. You can't have both double-precision and single-precision numbers. Until version 5.3 (which is still considered a bit new and edgy in Lua-land, being only nine years old), there were no integer types. The ecosystem is profoundly insecure, since there is no cryptography in the standard library so you have to download the cryptography library from the package repository. How do you verify that the cryptography library is not backdoored? You _can't_. There is a package manager which is maintained by ... somebody ... and is not endorsed by the Lua maintainers. The Lua maintainers are perfectly happy to release minor versions of the language that profoundly break existing code -- eg the meaning of `let x = 1` changed profoundly between version 5.2 and 5.3. It's been a long time since I worked in Lua and these are the things I dimly remember from a decade ago.

Reply

[-]

Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit

Just wanted to mention LuaDoc (or LDoc being the newest?) that fixes some of the issues you mentioned.But it's still not as nice as static typing or how Typescript works sadly.

Reply

[-]

VidaOnce@reddit

LuaLS is near on par with Typescript. I don't think people use even LDoc much nowadays.

Reply

[-]

Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit

Are you sure about that? LuaLS doesn't even have type inference like Typescript does. And it doesn't detect many errors, up until i run into them at runtime. Still a big difference in experience compared to Typescript.

Reply

[-]

VidaOnce@reddit

Yeah that "near" was a bit of a stretch. Type inference always worked for me, unless I'm misunderstanding. But I didn't really have problems using LuaLS, beyond *for some reason* generics not working for non-classes. I guess you'd have more issues if your codebase used metamethods (besides the basic use of `__index` for OOP) heavily. But the small features like literal strings as types bring the experience close enough to TS for me dx wise.

Reply

[-]

Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit

Hmm I did use metatables for inheritance, and there are quirks here and there. I've worked with Typescript a lot, so when I moved to Lua, I've felt a lot of difference. I felt that type inference was basically non-existent, I \*needed\* to annotate all functions and classes without missing anything to actually have lsp work on those types, and also, the way luals reports errors is not really convenient, when you change functions, they only report it at the call site and not the definition site as well. Which means you have to actually go through all the possible call sites on your own before you manage to fix all erroneous function calls. Those are things that usually both Typescript and even Rust do well.

Reply

[-]

VidaOnce@reddit

A lot of those things you listed are what's great about the language. No undefined + void + null. Just nil. And not erroring on an index is fine? How else are you supposed to check if a field exists? It's an untyped language. Pretending it isn't with runtime errors everywhere is the worst of both worlds imo. You have EmmyLua / LuaLS if you want typing in your codebase. As for your grievances with PUC Lua, LuaJIT is perfectly fine and isn't adding nonsense syntax like <const>. I do agree Lua's ecosystem is nonexistant which is why I believe Python dethroned it so easily.

Reply

[-]

iangc@reddit

Funny story about that, I've studied with the language creator, Roberto in my Uni. I asked him about why he made such a weird decision and he claimed the entire premise of arrays starting at 0 made no sense, and was an inheritance from c where the index was used for pointer arithmetic. He said as time went on and abstractions increased people should have left it behind and started using 1 as the first index but they never did because programmers don't like change. In my opinion I see where he's coming from but I think it's kind of a funny hill to die on...

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

I don't want to insult the person who created a highly influential language that's survived the test of time, but that reasoning feels so terrible to me. I can't know how landscape in 1993, but it feels a lot of the reasoning why 0-based indexing is superior was well-established by then. [Dijkstra wrote a now authoritative piece on this in 1983](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html). While I can't be positive in the growing CS world, I'm pretty sure it was well-circulated 10 years later. By the Time Roberto started writing Lua, there had been a decade-long 1-based indexing trend, and it died because 1-based indexing was bad. Zero-based indexing didn't just win because it matches the memory offsets better. It won because it was demonstrated to be better in practice.

Reply

[-]

Joeyschmo102@reddit

Python is fast It's called numpy

Reply

[-]

CeleritasLucis@reddit

That's just C++ with makeup to make it look pretty

Reply

[-]

belaros@reddit

Everything is assembly with makeup

Reply

[-]

anatoledp@reddit

Everything is binary with makup

Reply

[-]

itsfreerealestate22@reddit

Base code

Reply

[-]

krackout21@reddit

It's C, not C++

Reply

[-]

Aidalon@reddit

Yup that’s the point

Reply

[-]

Joeyschmo102@reddit

Precisely

Reply

[-]

AtebYngNghymraeg@reddit

I wrote an Android game in Lua with Solar2d... it's not something I'd rush into again. I really hated Lua, it struck me as really ugly. I don't like python either, for the record.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

I don't know why, but Lua never jived with me. And it was the #1 scripting language for games for years. I always thought it was overhyped. I always felt "it's fast because it's minimal. But I don't write C in my day job either".

Reply

[-]

MooseBoys@reddit

Lua used to be great as a scripting language for games because of how easily you could embed and execute the VM however you wanted. These days, however, python is just as easy to embed: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/index.html

Reply

[-]

Fridux@reddit

Python might be easy to embed, but it's definitely not easy to sandbox, which is where Lua actually shines.

Reply

[-]

Rarelyimportant@reddit

That's like saying why go to the trouble of getting contact lenses when [these glasses are so easy to put on](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/5336fa0f-7782-44ff-9e02-e89133341ac1/d6scwl1-51274a65-1b63-4bdc-a60d-88953cb9d0ee.jpg/v1/fit/w_640,h_425,q_70,strp/steampunk_telescope_brown_by_steampunklab_d6scwl1-375w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9NDI1IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNTMzNmZhMGYtNzc4Mi00NGZmLTllMDItZTg5MTMzMzQxYWMxXC9kNnNjd2wxLTUxMjc0YTY1LTFiNjMtNGJkYy1hNjBkLTg4OTUzY2I5ZDBlZS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9NjQwIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmltYWdlLm9wZXJhdGlvbnMiXX0.a3pQbD-SeprI1AlqALtYPgzWCqdlEyAwUVOIii24XMk)

Reply

[-]

d05dev@reddit

The language is so satanic that it starts all of its indexes at 1 instead of 0.

Reply

[-]

likethevegetable@reddit

I use it for LuaLaTeX and it's awesome for that use. There are some pretty bad design choices in Lua (at least IMO and use cases), but you're right it's wicked fast, and very easy to learn.

Reply

[-]

Hopeful-Sir-2018@reddit

Words cannot express how much I dislike LUA primarily because Blizzard uses it for WoW addons and they have some *bizarre* shit they do in there. I'm sure the language isn't bad if you use a new version and don't do hacky shit but man...

Reply

[-]

tiller_luna@reddit

I'd not say it's similar to Python. But it is lightweight and pleasingly easy to integrate as scripting language into an app

Reply

[-]

Asleep-Dress-3578@reddit

Poor C++ is getting lots of blame nowadays, and some Rust fans are already burrying it for no reason.

Reply

[-]

NotAUsefullDoctor@reddit

I can't remember the exact year, but around 2015 there were major updates to C++ that made it such a nicer language to work with. So many QoL features have been added since then without loosing any niceties of the language. Wish it got more love. That being said, I'll be ready to dump it in a heartbeat if Carbon delivers on its promise.

Reply

[-]

Ketroc21@reddit

Same thing for java. Java gets dumped on for features (or lack of) that haven't been true for many years. It's basically just as nice to use as any other OO language.

Reply

[-]

NotAUsefullDoctor@reddit

Java is easy to dunk on because it was an industry standard and had "enterprise" standards. It had a lot of baggage even before you consider the language itself. Java 1.8 was such a fun jump, and 1.9 solidified that tooling (or is that when Java went to whole number numbering?). I loved using its functional tooling (functional interfaces were just fun) and the like. That being said, after developing in Java/Spring for a few years during the bet time to be on spring (post XML and pre "everything is a config file"), learning all of the magic and niceties, I switched to Go. I like not using any frameworks (standard http is enough for me), having a minimal library, importing made super simple, and setting up a running environment being trivial. I will never crap on Java as Spring is the best framework out there hands down. Also, the spring documentation is the only documentation I know of for an enterprise level product that I can feel confident in it being up to date and informative. Ok, I will crap on one thing: **AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryAsyncBeanBuilderImpl**

Reply

[-]

omega-rebirth@reddit

I have found Spring to be better for fast prototyping and actually terrible for when you actually want to implement the real project and fine tune everything to your liking. Try to figure out how to do certain things with Spring and you just find a bunch of "you shouldn't want to do that" cope from the Spring community.

Reply

[-]

Xatraxalian@reddit

>I can't remember the exact year, but around 2015 there were major updates to C++ that made it such a nicer language to work with. True, but the C++ committee should create a C++ compiler that just accepts C from 2015 and then use Editions like Rust does. If you compile a Rust Edition 2015 project, you can't use newer things in there. If you compile a Rust Edition 2021 project, you can't use deprecated things. Having one compiler that compiles every C++ program created in the history of ever without limits is madness, because old stuff will stay in use; worse, old stuff will be used for new projects.

Reply

[-]

NotAUsefullDoctor@reddit

I think this just stems from the same reason C++ will be around for a long time to come, and why Rust will never truly replace it (even if it should): legacy code. Systems that still use C++ still require updates. And, developers will want to use the new shiny features. But, you can't go back and rewrite an entire banking system just so you can use a functional argument.

Reply

[-]

Asleep-Dress-3578@reddit

Yeah, C++ continuously adds features with C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20 and recently C++23. Just check out Cpp2/Cppfront, it solves some problems and soon it will get a permissive licence.

Reply

[-]

Xatraxalian@reddit

The problem is that it rarely deprecates or even remove old features... so old stuff stays in use.

Reply

[-]

CelDaemon@reddit

The issue is that some people are forced to not use the newer cpp features

Reply

[-]

tu_tu_tu@reddit

C++ is so big that at this point it's not a language but a language contructor.

Reply

[-]

Opposite_Elk6451@reddit

What do you mean language constructor?

Reply

[-]

tu_tu_tu@reddit

You always use not just a language but a subset of it with it's own rules, constraints and practices. C++ is extremly diverce on it. When you write on Qt C++, modern C++ or late 90's C++ it feels like you write with three different languages.

Reply

[-]

imgly@reddit

Well, I'm C++ dev for about 15 years that now dev in Rust. Here is my opinion : The C++ have a lot of good feature so you can almost always code what you want with several optimizations and compile time features. That said, C++ became verbose and there are so much features in the syntax itself that there are thousands of way to write the same thing (*exaggerated*). You can build a lot of compile time stuff with constant expressions and template, but it is often overcomplicated things because of the lack of features (like built in reflection for example) or because there are too much obsolete features (sfinae instead of concepts, type_traits instead of static constexpr, new/delete instead of smart pointers,... ). On top of that, the C++ committee use to never remove old syntax nor old standard library, so the language became a huge mess and make new features very verbose. The Rust tried to fix those problems and it successfully did imo. The syntax has several features but not too much and not invasive for next features, Rust has language edition, so some features can be added, removed or updated without compromising the old projects, meta programming using templates is limited but the procedural macros makes meta programming so much powerful and easy to read... Really, the rust is very comfortable to program with. Now, that said, I'm very curious about a real C++ successor, like Carbon or cppfront from Herb Sutter. A programming language that tries to avoid the bad stuffs from the C++, making it simpler and easier to read and write, adding cool features but with the cool features from he C++ (like type templating which is the coolest C++ feature imo), that would be awesome!

Reply

[-]

edcdecl@reddit

what do you mean by "type\_traits instead of static constexpr"?

Reply

[-]

Realistic_Command_87@reddit

C++ deserves some hate lol

Reply

[-]

katyasparadise@reddit

If only it gets a standard build system/package manager, like Rust's Cargo.

Reply

[-]

omega-rebirth@reddit

Honestly, Ruby is a FAR more comfy and expressive language to use on a regular basis compared to Python, but people are stupid and don't understand that Ruby is not the same thing as the framework called Ruby on Rails. You can and absolutely should use Ruby without Rails for nearly anything that doesn't require the performance of a compiled language.

Reply

[-]

biggip1@reddit

I wish HTML got more love, very under appreciated language for coding games-

Reply

[-]

WiseDark7089@reddit

Tcl.

Reply

[-]

neo-B@reddit

Anybody outside of the fpga / HDL world still use tcl?

Reply

[-]

jamesharder@reddit

F5 bigip uses TCL for it's iRules.

Reply

[-]

WiseDark7089@reddit

The macports system in macos is written in tcl.

Reply

[-]

dingdongbongs@reddit

Haha hello fellow Tcler. Don't know a lot of people using this for production.

Reply

[-]

WiseDark7089@reddit

TBH I never used it myself beyond hello world. But the language feels clean and has nice design.

Reply

[-]

Sarttu@reddit

I used Tk for the GUI desktop app I built with Common Lisp at my company for internal use.

Reply

[-]

KeyGroundbreaking390@reddit

VBscript

Reply

[-]

SubzeroCola@reddit

Java. It seems to get a lot of hate, but it's like a user-friendly C++

Reply

[-]

AwabKhan@reddit

He asked the most underrated and you name java.

Reply

[-]

SubzeroCola@reddit

I've never heard anyone praise it. They praise Python the most, and then Rust and C#. And then C++ for stuff like operator overloading and memory management. That's it! Never heard anyone praise anything else!

Reply

[-]

AwabKhan@reddit

Yeah but he said an underrated language that's not getting enough love. Java might get hate or isn't praised but it is definitely not an underrated language.

Reply

[-]

SubzeroCola@reddit

Bro underrated means its not getting enough love lol

Reply

[-]

AwabKhan@reddit

Oh, i thought underrated meant how less it was being used. So java is underrated because its hated, becuase it is used by a lot of tech companies.

Reply

[-]

AgemaOfThePeltasts@reddit

C# kind of fits here. Sure it's not some tiny unheard of language, but I would say it's still underrated. It's not and never will be trendy or widely talked bout, and yet I'm pretty sure the world would literally stop spinning without it. It's that widely used in a bunch of critical infrastructure.

Reply

[-]

SlapsOnrite@reddit

I'd say Java and C# consistently rank as the "slight less used Python" They're the workhorse of enterprise solutions.

Reply

[-]

AbramKedge@reddit

Bash. I've been using a lot of bash scripting in my current project - setting up an automated system for typesetting a book in different formats and generating an audiobook (not to sell, just to help with proofreading). It's going well, but the array processing syntax took some grokking.

Reply

[-]

crusoe@reddit

Shellcheck tool is great for bash programming.

Reply

[-]

telco_tech@reddit

Forth. I know.. it's goofy, more than a bit archaic, and as specific in its programming as the fingerprints of the coder. It's a hot mess that makes your ex wife seem like salvation incarnate. But it's my jam, by a damn sight.

Reply

[-]

crusoe@reddit

Factor which is kinda like forth. Try it out. It has a pretty complete runtime too.

Reply

[-]

crusoe@reddit

Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo is a truly OO language and everyone should use it for a little while.

Reply

[-]

iHateTheStuffYouLike@reddit

FORmula TRANslator. Frequently beats everything else for computing fluid mechanics.

Reply

[-]

LaOnionLaUnion@reddit

Honestly the things I enjoy are hated by some and considered overrated by others. As someone in security I like Rust and Go.

Reply

[-]

GloriousShroom@reddit

SQL. The bedrock of the modern economy. Also I came from accounting so my thought patterns match SQL better then other syntax's. You can do cool shit with SQL.

Reply

[-]

Wolf-Training@reddit

SQL, Excel, and Powerpoint influence billions if not trillions of dollars lol

Reply

[-]

GloriousShroom@reddit

I went to business school . They really should have excel classes. Everyone uses excel but nobody knows what they are doing. Sloppy formulas . No checks to verify if stuff is right. (Like adding all the subtotals to see if it matches the totals). so many errors causing real money losses for company.

Reply

[-]

Wolf-Training@reddit

Yes its a travesty really. meanwhile I'm a data engineer without a job for the past 6 months.

Reply

[-]

Relevant-Rhubarb-849@reddit

Julia It's not object oriented which garners a lot of disrespect but if you get good at you actually come to understand that object orientation can easily be replaced by a less complex idea of overloaded operator. The fact that this is true was not obvious to me when I started and I came to see why it's actually a more powerful paradigm The main virtue of Julia is that it recompiles every function as needed when a different data type is handed in. Thus it runs at compiled speed. But the most powerful truck it has is that Julia is written in Julia right down to the binary metal. So if you hand in a new Data type it recompiles it thorough every installed library call. That's true for libraries you did not code but just imported. Python can't so that. At some point any sophisticated fast function in python intersects a c-library and you can't compile into that if the c-library doesn't already know about the custom data type. For examlmd it's possible to take the derivative of any function in Julia even if the function calls things like say a differential equation solver or a sumbolic integration by parts. Even we need if you did not write that code.

Reply

[-]

SysError404@reddit

I did terrible at programming, and have never tried getting back into it. But I have family and friends that working in IT. And both of them have told me that if I decide to get back into program, to pick up COBOL. Despite the family and friend not knowing each other they both said that it's an old programming language, but that something around half of all banks still use it. And the big issue is, those that know the language, or the experts in it, are staring down the barrel of retirement. So I find it both terrifying and interesting that much of at least the National Banking system and a lot of federal systems are still run by a programming language that pre-dates the computer Mouse.

Reply

[-]

JackfruitJolly4794@reddit

Not only banks, but just about any business still using mainframes. They are still using it because it is rock solid.

Reply

[-]

SysError404@reddit

Or they don't want to cover the losses from downtime and the costs to upgrade.

Reply

[-]

JackfruitJolly4794@reddit

Possibly. If it ain’t broke…

Reply

[-]

lost_opossum_@reddit

They've been saying this for the last 30 years, but I'd check to see if there are actual jobs that they're hiring that use COBOL. If you're a programmer you can learn any language, they're all similar. It does take some time to get up to speed and be fluent though. But not that long. COBOL is one of the first programming languages, that and Fortran go pretty far back.

Reply

[-]

SysError404@reddit

I think being competent enough to integrate COBOL with more modern languages is the key. Sure it's likely easy to become familiar with the ancient languages. But it's likely more difficult to be fluent enough to integrate it well.

Reply

[-]

JackfruitJolly4794@reddit

PHP and groovy

Reply

[-]

No-Test-6281@reddit

Dart

Reply

[-]

nothingexceptfor@reddit

Pascal

Reply

[-]

AtebYngNghymraeg@reddit

I'm still working as a Delphi dev, and it's honestly a really nice language to use.

Reply

[-]

razopaltuf@reddit

Indeed! For people who want to give it a try, have a look at [Lazarus](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/), which is an open source Pascal IDE and GUI builder, similar to Delphi.

Reply

[-]

red-tea-rex@reddit

❤️ my high school taught programming in the 90's using this, despite that universities had already switched to OOP C++

Reply

[-]

singeblanc@reddit

Prolog

Reply

[-]

AtebYngNghymraeg@reddit

Absolutely not.

Reply

[-]

RuralWAH@reddit

Turbo PROLOG

Reply

[-]

Unairworthy@reddit

No.

Reply

[-]

singeblanc@reddit

And that took 2 days to return.

Reply

[-]

Accomplished-Ball413@reddit

Probably Python. It’s pretty ubiquious.

Reply

[-]

Xaxxus@reddit

Swift. It’s not just an Apple language. You can use it on every platform. And it’s really good.

Reply

[-]

flip_bit_@reddit

Absolutely. I really fell in love with Swift and am grateful I get to write swift on the job now.

Reply

[-]

Xaxxus@reddit

I wish it had more adoption outside of apples ecosystem. I would love to write swift to build back end or some other use cases.

Reply

[-]

Even_Cardiologist810@reddit

I'm not sure i'd touch that aigain after i was forced to use XCode which is the worst editor i've seen

Reply

[-]

Xaxxus@reddit

They have a VSCode plugin now. Obviously you can’t do iOS dev with that as all of those APIs are bundled with Xcode. But for general purpose Swift programming it works great.

Reply

[-]

arduous_raven@reddit

This. Swift made me really fall in love with programming. Honestly feel that if it was open sourced earlier in its development it'd be the up there with Rust (Embedded Swift was announced just a couple of months ago and its picking up speed). Not to mention that Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, has been on Swift development team for years now :)

Reply

[-]

advice-seeker-nya@reddit

greatest language of all time

Reply

[-]

jogglessshirting@reddit

It’s open source, surprisingly!

Reply

[-]

Xaxxus@reddit

It has been since 2016 if I recall.

Reply

[-]

azopeFR@reddit

Php is a great langage but have so much hate for no raison expecialy with great framework like sympfony

Reply

[-]

L3st3r5am@reddit

CLisp

Reply

[-]

Bogus007@reddit

Lisp?

Reply

[-]

ArtemZ@reddit

Could you elaborate please? What is so great about it? I recently tried to figure out how to create a web app in common lisp and it seems there are very few options to do so

Reply

[-]

Bogus007@reddit

Of course, lisp has its limitations, especially in web development. But think about mixed typing, macros, first-class functions etc. Guess in which language the first AI was written? It was 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁Lisp - in the 50s!!!🥳 There are not few who criticise unfortunately lisp for its extended use of parentheses or say that it is an old language, but common this does not mean that the language has no usability due to its particularities.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

> There are not few who criticise unfortunately lisp for its extended use of parentheses I'd say past-tense. We were manually formatting our code in vim/Emacs (and vim was not tuned for lisp at all, despite starting to beat emacs in popularity). It was a real bitch. In the modern world with prettier, those complaints would be nothing. Honestly, I don't know where SBCL is in the scheme of things, but if it's chuggin strong, we're one "Rails" away from Lisp being in businesses again. It just needs a reason for people to overcome the language divide and then start falling in love with it from a business POV. I'm not holding my breath, though. I gave up on it winning 20 years ago.

Reply

[-]

Bogus007@reddit

It is the reading. Typing is indeed less of a problem. Just imagine someone is used to work with code in C family, Java or Python, or started to learn to write these languages, and then has the chance to see (not a one liner but) an elaborate Lisp code. I guess the parentheses are for sure one thing that will pop out immediately. I came across an expression where a person stated analogous to « Lost in space » for Lisp « Lost in parentheses ». I don’t think it is fair to avoid lisp just due to the parentheses, though, but this you have mentioned in your post.

Reply

[-]

Frenchslumber@reddit

LISP's parenthesis is the most elegant design ever created. It allows such incredible things while sacrifices only a little familiarity in the beginning. I think the only reason it's wasn't taken well is just because human prefers to keep the insanity of infix notation instead of the clean and logical prefix notation in Lisp.

Reply

[-]

Rythoka@reddit

Infix notation isn't insanity - it's objectively easier to read in most cases. 3 + 2 - 1 * 5 is a hell of a lot easier for a human to parse than + 3 - 2 * 1 5.

Reply

[-]

Frenchslumber@reddit

It seems you have no idea what is meant by prefix notation in Lisp. The expression "3 + 2 - 1 \* 5" is equivalent to (+ 3 2 (\* -1 5)) in Lisp. >"Many languages make a pointless distinction between expression and statement, usually to support some horrible Blub syntax like infix assignment. In lisp, everything returns something and there are no (syntactic) restrictions on what you can nest or combine. It is a simple question with an obvious answer: what is more important in a language, newbie-friendly syntax or real flexibility? Any language that uses infix syntax is reducing the possibilities of its abstractions in many ways." - Doug Hoyte

Reply

[-]

Rythoka@reddit

I *do* understand prefix notation: >(+ 3 (- 2 (* 1 5))) and >(+ 3 2 (* -1 5)) are mathematically equivalent and give the same result in Lisp. I didn't write parenthesis because I wasn't actually trying to write valid Lisp - I was using Polish notation with binary operators. I disagree on your point about whether something can be objectively easier to parse or not at a fundamental level, but putting that aside, my point is that essentially everyone who has ever been taught math is going to be have immediate intuition about how to parse infix notation, even if just because of familiarity. Of course they're going to more comfortable reading infix notation, especially for mathematical expressions. It's incredibly useful when the meaning of a line of code is immediately understandable to the programmer without having to pick parenthesis apart. And to be clear, I'm not trying to shit on Lisp or prefix notation at all - Lisp is a fantastic, powerful language, and you're absolutely right that prefix notation is clean and logical. My point is just that it's not insane for programmers to want to use infix notation when it's usually the more ergonomic option - and when it's not, many languages allow them to fall back to a prefix-based notation anyway. re: Doug Hoyte: >It is a simple question with an obvious answer: what is more important in a language, newbie-friendly syntax or real flexibility? This question absolutely does not have an obvious answer, and is a false dichotomy anyway.

Reply

[-]

yiliu@reddit

If you're doing web stuff, use Clojure. It's a lisp, but runs on the JVM, and there's a ton of web-related libraries. It's even got a dialect for the browser, ClojureScript, that compiles to JS. That allows for interesting interaction between client & server.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

Clojure lacks half the good reasons to be using Common Lisp. It's still a great language, nonetheless.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

"Greenspun's tenth rule states that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains a slow, bug-ridden, and informally-specified implementation of half of Common Lisp" Common Lisp (or Scheme, if you must... the featureset is similar) is probably the language with the greatest feature-base, hands down. All the while, it still allegedly outbenchmarks even Rust (though since its' relevance has died down so much, it's hard to find more than snippets or random one-offs on the benchmark thing). Some of its most compelling features *simply have no comparison elsewhere*. Lisp Macros are truly something to behold. With comparably little technical ability, you can write a fast and effective DSL in Lisp for any problem domain. And here is perhaps the big dream AND big nightmare in common lisp. It was trivial, even best-practice, to construct or pass lisp code at run time and jit it. The binary would get injected with a minimal compiler and you would be able to run dynamically created code within a stone's throw of C's speed. Other languages except Forth have no comparison for this because they don't have trivial syntaxes. Everything in Lisp is a list, so you can just tell it to compile a list you made that *just happens to be a valid function.* > I recently tried to figure out how to create a web app in common lisp and it seems there are very few options to do so Yeah, there are few options. As an underrated language, it's an *underused* language. Huntchentoot and AllegroServe (or zasl/zserve) are both mature and well-accepted webservers in Lisp. Though it's also a lower-level language by design. ......which sorta starts to brush close to the main killer problem with Common Lisp. The best two compilers are (were?) payware, and not cheap. Allegro Common Lisp and Lispworks. They used to price out at $1000 per 1-developer license. ACL has now hidden their pricing, but Lispworks is advertising at $1500/dev/license now. And the problem is that they are SO FREAKING FAST that the open source CL's struggled to keep up for decades (and generally just settled with being non-jitting interpreters with the obvious speed-down of that). Well, not the only problem. ACL also pulled a Microsoft and extended Common Lisp in their proprietary solution. That's why zasl exists, as a compatibility layer. SBCL is a *great* and competitive opensource CL compiler, but it took them forever to figure out how to port it to Windows for reasons I didn't quite gather at the time (something about relying too heavily on the linux kernel or something). I spent the 00's obsessed with Lisp, hoping it would someday get over all those problems so I could consider it worth seeking a career in it. It never did.

Reply

[-]

god4gives@reddit

That’s because lisp is just not used for that. There’s a Paul Graham blog post where he explains why he regret writing hackernews in lisp IIRC, will try to find it

Reply

[-]

MidnightPale3220@reddit

That's the same Paul Graham who in another blog post around 15 years ago explained how he wrote some kind of web app in Lisp that allowed him to stay ahead of competition (because he could implement features their competitors tried, in a blink of an eye due to the coolness of the language)? I skimmed briefly along his essay titles, but there's such a lot of them, I am not sure which one it could be. If it is still online, considering what he apparently wrote after hackernews.

Reply

[-]

god4gives@reddit

Darn, I actually can't find it. It *might* be the blog post you described. Yeah he loves Lisp.

Reply

[-]

moving-landscape@reddit

Did you find it

Reply

[-]

Frenchslumber@reddit

Alan Kay, the computer scientist who created Object Oriented Programming paradigm said this: "Lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed". He also said this: "I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." "Only Lisp and Smalltalk are true Object Oriented Programming languages". Of course he said it a while ago, nowadays there are OOP languages in the same class of Lisp and Smalltalk, but I just mentioned it to stress the Meta-Paradigm aspect of Lisp. When I say Lisp here, I'm gonna refer to Common Lisp. Lisp is a family of programming languages, of which the most notable are Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, Racket, Emacs Lisp,... with the distinguishing fully parenthesized appearance. LISP stands for LISt Processor. >"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp." - Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, and Bach It is truly the most flexible programming language. It does everything exceptionally well. While most other programming languages are usually considered as a programming language that is strong at something, Lisp instead is known as "The Programmable Programming Language." What that means is with Lisp, you can add any feature you like that wasn't provided by the language designers, and then use it as if it has been supported the whole time. With Lisp you can even change its own syntax and do whatever you want. Lisp usually favors the Functional Programming approach, yet thanks to CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) and the Meta Object Protocol, Lisp has features that go beyond most current OOP systems. It is the kind of programming language that just helps you do whichever style of programming you like. Here is what Richard Stallman said, >"The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages." - Richard Stallman In addition to that, it is much easier and simpler to learn Lisp than most other programming languages if you don't know programming. (Scheme is even easier to learn than Python if you have never seen a programming language before.) >“LISP is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.” – Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker" Lisp Macros is another beast, it is the omnipotent tool for Meta-Programming, which are programs that write programs. This is a class that other than Lisp, no other languages come close. (Some macros systems are better than others but none has come as far as Lisp Macros.) >"Common Lisp macros are to C++ templates what poetry is to IRS tax forms." - Christian Schafmeister Pretty much all the great ideas in Computer Science came from Lisp: Conditional, Recursion, Garbage Collection, First Class Function, Homo-iconicity, Lisp was the first high-level Functional Programming language, and was the first to implement Lambda Calculus, etc... and of course AI programming started out in Lisp as well. It is known as the playground that gives birth to ideas. Here's a quote from Dijkstra: >"Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer.” I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts." – Edsger Dijkstra

Reply

[-]

robhanz@reddit

LISP is an *incredibly* interesting language. I'd argue it doesn't have a "parser", per se. That's a slight exaggeration. Really, parsers convert text to an abstract syntax tree. But in LISP, you really just have a *notation for creating an abstract syntax tree*. Beyond that, LISP lets you *modify that syntax tree at runtime*. LISP macros are basically *rules for generating chunks of a syntax tree*.

Reply

[-]

YoggSogott@reddit

Bob Martin said it is the language where you create your own language inside of it. It gives you a small set of instruments, but allows you to do A LOT with it. You should use it wisely and it is your responsibility to maintain good abstractions, so you should be disciplined about it.

Reply

[-]

holamifuturo@reddit

I'm intending to learn programming through a Racket course (which is part of Lisp family). And I saw teachers explaining away to reviewers that the beauty of Lisp languages isn't the practicality of the language but how it forces you to think programmatically and how you will learn to think how a language works semantically. I'm not sure if I'm right lol.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

Yeah, I've heard the same. I consider it BS. The beauty of Lisp is that you can use any dev/design pattern, past or present (probably future), in a reasonably-high-level language, and compile to the speed of a systems-level language. The downside is that you'll be completely alone doing it and nobody will hire you to. :-/ MIT used to teach their freshman 101 course in Scheme/Racket. Their textbook, [SICP, aka the Wizard Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs), is one of the 4 or 5 most iconic books in Computer Science. By the end of the class, you had built a scheme interpreter/compiler, using scheme. Now compiler-design is a senior-level course. It's *that* practical. Scheme sorta evolved more "school friendly" than Common Lisp did. I think that hurt its business viability. Like the abililty to paste an image into source-code and save it as a variable is cutesy and neat, but not something we're going to want in practice, and a bitch for trying to use an IDE.

Reply

[-]

frobnosticus@reddit

I wish library support was more ubiquitous. It's lovely. But just a pain in the arse to get anything done in without reinventing the wheels...however elegantly.

Reply

[-]

NatoBoram@reddit

Elixir and Dart Dart is basically Google's Java. It compiles natively to every platform, it's statically typed and statically compiled, it has all the OOP features yet it's not OOP, it's fully open source without any license bombs, it's modern and has a very expressive syntax. Elixir has built-in distributed computing, which is not something you see every day. It has a Ruby syntax and is untyped, which are both annoying when you want distributed computing. Its `=` operator is a *pattern match* operator, so it's very cool to use. It's functional and has `if` expressions, which is very practical. Functions can be overloaded but it uses pattern matching instead of changing the function's signature, which is so much better than function overloading.

Reply

[-]

dandmcd@reddit

Dart always looks nice, but being backed by Google is generally the reason I'll avoid it. I can never place my trust in them to support their own product.

Reply

[-]

NatoBoram@reddit

Go, Dart and Flutter aren't going away. I also refused to learn TypeScript at first because it was an effort led by Microsoft, but it's fully open source, which is rare with Microsoft. Sometimes, you need to set aside your prejudice and think more critically.

Reply

[-]

vardonir@reddit

I used to think that Google Reader, Chromecast, and [many many many other Google products (some of them decades-old)](https://killedbygoogle.com/) weren't going away, either. I love Dart/Flutter, I use it myself, but it has a death sentence when it was born because it's a Google product.

Reply

[-]

KamasamaK@reddit

Your Chromecast isn't going to stop working because of that, though. They're just discontinuing the product line because the technology driving it -- Google Cast -- is already in so many devices, including their upcoming Google TV Streamer. Now if they kill Google Cast, that will be a huge deal.

Reply

[-]

obiworm@reddit

I was gonna say, none of those products compare cus they’re not foss, but then I saw Angular. RIP.

Reply

[-]

vardonir@reddit

Soon you'll see Tensorflow in there, too.

Reply

[-]

dandmcd@reddit

Microsoft heavily supports their software, and has for a very long time. Google hasn't proven to have the same type of concern for the open source community.

Reply

[-]

Droidatopia@reddit

Microsoft hasn't been that Microsoft for at least 2 decades.

Reply

[-]

NatoBoram@reddit

It's still doing Microsoft things, https://ghuntley.com/fracture

Reply

[-]

Mikkelet@reddit

Absolutely not Dart, I wish google had went with Kotlin over Dart for flutter. It feels old and verbose, Java-esque, with a lot of weird choices like missing function-overloads, _ as access modifier. Flutter doesn't even support necessary compiler features to enable serialization.. for a front-end oriented language. Sorry, I got gripes. My pick would be Kotlin. Not because of JVM, but it's the best syntax I've ever worked with. JetBrains really care about this langauge, and it shows

Reply

[-]

AdeptInflation@reddit

You could not be more wrong about Dart being verbose and Java-esque, dude. I've worked with both for years now and I love Dart BECAUSE it's so much more concise and neat (subjectively) than Java.

Reply

[-]

Mikkelet@reddit

Yeah, I've also worked with both a lot. Currently working as a Flutter developer, but have worked with Android since 2011-12 with Java, and Kotlin since. I don't mean to take your enjoyment away from Dart, but there are better syntaxes out there. My biggest gripe is mostly that it was the preferred language for Flutter. Handling JSON, or *any* type of serialization for that matter, in Dart is outright terrible. Keep in mind that most data is serialized when sent to or received from a service, so it's a lot.

Reply

[-]

NatoBoram@reddit

JetBrains gives no shit about the language, what they want is your money

Reply

[-]

Mikkelet@reddit

Man they can have them as long as they keep making great languages!

Reply

[-]

rakotomandimby@reddit

OCaml. It has almost everything.

Reply

[-]

billyteller@reddit

Perl. It's very powerful.

Reply

[-]

Character_Skirt_2905@reddit

Rust

Reply

[-]

lost_opossum_@reddit

I don't understand how anyone can like Haskell. I couldn't get it. I felt like I had two arms tied around my back when I tried to do anything. Its supposed to make it easier to prove the program's correctness, which I understand, but it makes it so hard to do anything with all of its type restrictions. Maybe its me, but UGH.

Reply

[-]

Acceptable-Wind-2366@reddit

Knew a Haskell dev who joked that he would never go to a Haskell conference. "All it would take is for a bus to crash through the main bar to set back Haskell a decade".

Reply

[-]

lost_opossum_@reddit

And noone would know!

Reply

[-]

Acceptable-Wind-2366@reddit

ow... burn :)

Reply

[-]

Rei922@reddit

Smalltalk Truly an inspirational language. I do understand why it's not used more though.

Reply

[-]

Acceptable-Wind-2366@reddit

"I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby." - Kent Beck Maybe a little optimistic on Kent's part, but Smalltalk was the first programming language I really loved, but coming out of uni opportunities were few and far between. It was only decades into my career that I got to play with Ruby and fell in love with coding again. Smalltalk had so many great ideas. While it's sad it never found its place outside of certain niches, it still had an oversized influence on other languages. And for old folks like me, gave a leg up into object-oriented programming before it ever hit the mainstream.

Reply

[-]

razopaltuf@reddit

> I do understand why it's not used more though. The reason I heard most frequently was that it was successful up to a point. Problem was that it had no common free/open implementation at a time when it became expected, so other languages that did got its market share. Probably less relevant, but some influential books like »Design Patterns « used C++ as their main language for examples.

Reply

[-]

WillAdams@reddit

Hard to compile a stand-alone binary? Most apps are distributed as a stripped-down environment.

Reply

[-]

EvilGeniusPanda@reddit

Clojure is great, takes a little while getting used to it but it's so elegant in its approach. Pity its on the JVM.

Reply

[-]

Mango5509@reddit

PHP 🫣 Not because it’s fun to use (everyone knows it’s not), but because there are plenty of freelance jobs requiring PHP skills.

Reply

[-]

Motorola__@reddit

C

Reply

[-]

Hert_Z@reddit

I read somewhere that nowadays, C is just a language to understand the basics and that's it. Being a beginner myself, I don't know C at all and have like mad respect to people who know C. I'm just impressed when I see someone doing C.

Reply

[-]

Miserable-Cheetah683@reddit

Well thank you sir 😎. (Embedded C dev for 10 years).

Reply

[-]

Hert_Z@reddit

Please don't call me sir. I'm just 17 lol.

Reply

[-]

Miserable-Cheetah683@reddit

And I am double your age, but it don’t matter. As long as you got my respect, I’m calling you sir.

Reply

[-]

Hert_Z@reddit

LoL. Thanks ig 😀

Reply

[-]

Xatraxalian@reddit

C is a very small language. It's also very easy to learn. However, it is extremely hard to write well and write safely. Take a look at Rust. It's a language that can be hard to learn, but after you get it, code writes itself and you don't ever have to think about any C pitfalls again. There's C, there's C++, and there's C#, but I would have totally understood if Rust had been named C² (C-Square).

Reply

[-]

callmesilver@reddit

C is a medieval sword blade that you need to forge a mental hilt for.

Reply

[-]

Xatraxalian@reddit

That is an apt description. C can do anything and everything you want, including blowing your own head off and kill kittens in other countries.

Reply

[-]

SuperSathanas@reddit

It depends on what you're doing. For lower level things that need or could benefit from less abstraction, have strict hardware/memory limitations or for performance critical things, C (or C++) is the best or possibly only choice (probably Rust as well in many instances). For most desktop applications, though, almost any language you choose is going to get the job done.

Reply

[-]

Hert_Z@reddit

True. But what I'm trying to say is that C is not a language just to learn the basics. And what you have said just shows that it can be used for other things as well.

Reply

[-]

DarkIceLight_47@reddit

Just saying what I heard from others. C is still a great tool and solid all rounder. There is probably not a single job that is *best* solved with C, however for some people its actually easier to use then C# and C++. If you are not a professional I think everything is fine if you feel good with it, if you need it as a professional its probably to out of trend that it would be worth learning.

Reply

[-]

Miserable-Cheetah683@reddit

“Not a single job that is best solved with C”. Embedded/Firmware development are written in C because of their low overhead. C is simple but unforgiving. If u make a mistake, it can be hard to debug. What makes a good C coder is someone who understands the code architecture and the hardware limitations. We spend most of our time studying the hardware and specifications rather than coding. I did a job where I coded objective-C. I wrote close to 10,000 line of code in 3 months. With C i wrote about 4000 line of code in one year. I spent most of my time understanding the embedded application.

Reply

[-]

DarkIceLight_47@reddit

Sorry for my miss information, thank you for your correction.

Reply

[-]

thisisntmynameorisit@reddit

It’s not that difficult really. C++ for example has way more features to learn. C is fairly simple to learn. It’s just it’s maybe harder to write a good program in C as there are a lot of pitfalls and easy mistakes which can be made when you have so much freedom that higher level languages sort of restrict you from.

Reply

[-]

Hopeful-Sir-2018@reddit

C allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, badly. The fact `printf` is still suggested by many books speaks to part of the problem. (in case anyone was wondering [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_format_string) is one of the *many* reasons not to use `printf` - there's, practically, usually a better answer). C is dangerous in ways you wouldn't expect - that's the real problem. It's why so much code is insecure - because few books teach you how to write *good* code. They just get you through the basics and say 'good luck' which is most unfortunate because C is *everywhere*. By now you've probably connected the dots of "if C is everywhere and it's easy to make bugs, does that means bugs are everywhere?" - yes. Yes they are. And it takes a lot of effort to make good, stable, and secure code.

Reply

[-]

TheReservedList@reddit

Uhhh.. there’s nothing wrong with printsf

Reply

[-]

Miserable-Cheetah683@reddit

Printf can starve the system for a long time and since printf is non-reentrant it cannot be preempted during its execution.

Reply

[-]

SomeNerdO-O@reddit

Many projects use C or C++ at some point due to their speed. That being said it's not always the best tool for the job though it is my favorite language

Reply

[-]

ShroomSensei@reddit

C is used in low level applications all the time, like operating system level interactions. C for learning is to understand the TRUE basics.. memory management, how classes work under the hood, pointers, etc.

Reply

[-]

Hert_Z@reddit

Yea. C is a good language to understand the basics but C is not just limited to understanding the basics and letting it be. It can be used for many other things.

Reply

[-]

fuddlesworth@reddit

C isn't underrated. It's just where it's used is very specific.

Reply

[-]

brunogadaleta@reddit

C3 https://c3-lang.org/ "An evolution, not a revolution"

Reply

[-]

frobnosticus@reddit

Underrated comment right here.

Reply

[-]

Erenjaeger100@reddit

C#, at least here in India it is underrated

Reply

[-]

frobnosticus@reddit

perl. No horseshit jack. Keys to the universe. And I mean perl 5.x, not that other goofy silliness that never got off the ground. All of that "python is so easy to get up and running with" is adorable and only improves on perl in that regard if you're alergic to symbols to denote code structure. Rare is the faculty that can beat native regex support and the "welp, I don't know what you were TRYING to do with that code, but I'll try and do SOMEthing with it." philosophy. Which differs from garbage like javascript and php in that it's intentional as opposed to those dumpster fires where they just suck. People say lisp but it just doesn't have enough library support to be generally useful. I love lisp too. But I need more to use it for GP programming. Come at me bro. Taking all comers. (Saw someone on twitch yesterday programming in Zig, which I'd never heard of before. Looked pretty cool.)

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

I can't disagree with you on Perl. I worked at a perl shop that nearly bankrupted itself trying to create a subset of our basic perl app in Java. They brought in 20 developers to build it and missed the deadline by over a year. The Perl version was written by a couple developers and was so easy to maintain the company forked it for each client with 1 developer adding/maintaining it. Not a smart idea, the forking of it. But the rest makes Perl look good. As for Lisp, I begrudgingly agree. There's so much potential, and it's not hard to write a great library, **but nobody is doing it.**

Reply

[-]

frobnosticus@reddit

Right? It's witchcraft. And even among the society of "those who think like programmers" acumen with Perl is of yet a different niche. And I'm almost tired of HEARING about Lisp after a half century. I'm team emacs so I'll always screw around with it. But they've GOTTA meet us half way on Common or something. It's infuriating.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

> Right? It's witchcraft. And even among the society of "those who think like programmers" acumen with Perl is of yet a different niche. For sure. Admittedly, node.js *can* do much the same, too, if you don't start adding in things you don't need. But I can't think of another language that can. And I prefer expressjs to Catalyst, and ANYTHING to DBIx::Class if I'm being honest :) > And I'm almost tired of HEARING about Lisp after a half century. I'm team emacs so I'll always screw around with it. I used to be team vim. Now I'm team IDE (sorry!). I think that's why I never really tried to make Lisp a thing myself. There's some great things out there, just a need for more attention, devs, etc. I could write a CLEAN framework in CL if I really wanted to, but I'd have limited choices for each component. I could MAKE each component individually fairly easily, but they add up to a lot of components that don't exist yet. But maybe that's not fair. A quick search suggests you could probably build said framework with `ahungry` for DI, `postmodern` for an ORM, `clavier` for route validation, etc etc etc. Looks like this `caveman` library is pretty badass for elegant web requests, etc... But nobody has *done* it. It's just hypothetical. A random book from 10 years ago. But no common articles, youtube videos, documentation, etc. Common Lisp *lost*, and continues to lose. I don't think its raw quality, even great libraries, really matters when you consider that fact. > But they've GOTTA meet us half way on Common or something How do you mean?

Reply

[-]

jmhimara@reddit

What is the library support like in Perl?

Reply

[-]

frobnosticus@reddit

Lately? Psh. NO idea. I sadly mostly gave it up about 8-10 years ago. The stuff I write and run now is pretty much all, erm... let's call it "architecturally basic" servers with data processing code and "clever" structures. It's been a very long time since I've needed something new or (in fairness) had trouble finding something I needed out there. But my god do I look for reasons and am just gleeful when I find them. And, with apologies to Randall Munroe, it just feels like the source code to the universe. (reference: https://xkcd.com/224/)

Reply

[-]

fuddlesworth@reddit

I worked at one of the largest companies still using perl 5. I do not miss it.

Reply

[-]

oldmanwillow21@reddit

$perl++ though Raku (new nae for "Perl 6") is a living, breathing thing now.

Reply

[-]

novagenesis@reddit

Hypercard. Cmon, nobody had to say it? Hypercard was an incredible language/environment that nobody has been able to match since. Also, Myst was originally written in Hypercard.

Reply

[-]

Livid_Pressure_3632@reddit

C++. There is too much hate for it

Reply

[-]

montycolonelmustard@reddit

C is not getting enough love at the moment, people are looking for C killers when it’s still got all the control

Reply

[-]

Hour-Plenty2793@reddit

D, it has everything to be as popular as Go but for some reason it’s the opposite, forgotten to oblivion.

Reply

[-]

singeblanc@reddit

# PHP Powers something like 70% of the web, but has been "dying this year" for the last 20 years.

Reply

[-]

AdWitty1713@reddit

Haha yes, always the same wording Tbh, it was never easy to have a good and easy web backend. PHP was almost the only choice. I experimented with .NET Core and the feeling is like handle a Laravel Project. Very nice to work with it

Reply

[-]

IndependentMonth1337@reddit

Most of it is shitty WordPress sites.

Reply

[-]

TheClovergent@reddit

This. If it wasn't for PHP, the web would've been a much darker place. Plus it's a really good language to learn and has evolved a lot. Laravel and Symphony are rock solid frameworks. Not to mention there's so much PHP code out there and so much money to be made. PHP really is lambo money. Meanwhile, "the cool JS kids" can't get anything done, because they haven't decided which framework to choose yet.

Reply

[-]

red-tea-rex@reddit

Came here to say this. Big fan, since I wouldn't have broken into web development without it ❤️

Reply

[-]

RegisterConscious993@reddit

70% via WordPress. But I've been hearing good things about Laravel for some time now. Seems more devs are coming around to PHP. I wish I had more time to allocate and learn the language.

Reply

[-]

pat_trick@reddit

Everyone loves to hate on PHP but dang if it isn't ubiquitous.

Reply

[-]

PerceptionOdd4537@reddit

lua

Reply

[-]

madmendude@reddit

HolyC

Reply

[-]

Chap732@reddit

Based and terrypilled

Reply

[-]

madmendude@reddit

“What’s reality? I don’t know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, ‘That bird has no idea what he’s looking at.’ And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can’t really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he’s so ignorant? Well, he doesn’t really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn’t understand the world. You’re that bird looking at the monitor, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I can figure this out.’ Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do.” Terry A. Davis

Reply

[-]

Realistic_Command_87@reddit

Based and schizopilled

Reply

[-]

CandidCaramel7781@reddit

ruby

Reply

[-]

mrburnerboy2121@reddit

Yes, this is what got my into programming

Reply

[-]

tcpipwarrior@reddit

The most beautiful language in the world

Reply

[-]

mrburnerboy2121@reddit

Ruby

Reply

[-]

Odd-Establishment604@reddit

I come from DS and Bioinformatics. My first language was R. A lot of people pick Python, but I prefer R for being domain specific language. Math and statistics are made a lot better and easier in R. Including The plot options via ggplot. I also recently used Perl. Perl is really nice if you work with text and pattern matching.

Reply

[-]

leetnewb2@reddit

Nim (nim-lang.org) It gets an occasional wave of hype and adopters, keeps a few, but probably in a lull for the last year or two. I would have been shocked to see a thread like this without a nim reference in 2022. Nim reached 2.0 one year ago, stabilized pain points, fixed tooling, steadily improved. Like most smaller languages, it would benefit from a bigger community building libraries and supporting language development. But anyway, why do I like it? * Static typed, python-esque concise syntax, easy to read and write, limited boilerplate. * Compiles to c and javascript, and also has c++ and objectiveC backends. * Strong interoperability story with c / benefits from the vast ocean of c libraries. * Also benefits from the evolving ecosystem of c compilers, including gcc, llvm,clang, cosmopolitan, zig, emscripten * Memory management through reference counting unless you explicitly disable and do it yourself * Compile to a library for use in c, python, and other compatible languages Overall a fast to write and run language that probably does best in cli binaries and web backend/frontend (what more does one really need!?!), but wildly extensible through interoperability and metaprogramming features.

Reply

[-]

Agitated_Marzipan371@reddit

Android development with xml and extremely verbose Java used to be a pain. Now you can use concise, expressive Kotlin top to bottom, even for the build config instead of groovy. Also multiplatform seems to be becoming more popular.

Reply

[-]

hitanthrope@reddit

Clojure

Reply

[-]

RealLordDevien@reddit

Absolutely Clojure! Its such a beautiful intelligently designed language. Really rekindled my love for programming after years of corporate oop bullshit.

Reply

[-]

KaleidoscopeFront690@reddit

Visual Basic is seriously underrated, and here's why it deserves way more love: **1. Super Easy to Learn**: If you're just starting out or need a quick win, VB is a great choice. Its syntax is incredibly beginner-friendly. You can dive right into coding without getting bogged down by complex syntax rules. **2. Rapid Development**: VB is fantastic for rapid application development. The drag-and-drop interface in Visual Studio lets you whip up desktop apps in no time. Perfect for prototyping or building internal tools fast. **3. Microsoft Integration**: If you're working with Microsoft products like Excel, Access, or other Office tools, VB integrates seamlessly. It’s great for automating tasks and creating custom solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem. **4. Legacy Systems**: Tons of legacy systems out there were built with VB. If you're dealing with old software or maintaining a system that was built using VB, knowing it can be a huge asset. **5. Rich IDE**: Visual Studio’s IDE for VB is packed with features. You get a solid development environment with debugging tools, code suggestions, and more, which makes coding in VB a breeze. **6. Still Relevant**: Despite the hype around newer languages, VB is still actively used in many industries, especially in enterprise environments. There’s a niche but dedicated community, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Reply

[-]

Pacyfist01@reddit

I worked with a legacy VB6 system for few years. VB is pure hell!

Reply

[-]

my_password_is______@reddit

just declare option explicit and your problems are solved

Reply

[-]

Pacyfist01@reddit

If I did that the system would stop working, because someone somewhere was depending on that option not to be there. That's the excitement on working with legacy systems made in 2001.

Reply

[-]

plastikmissile@reddit

VB6 has the same issue as PHP. It gives you so much leeway that beginners abuse the hell out of it. Back when I still did VB, I would enforce that everyone in my team turn on strict and explicit modes.

Reply

[-]

bravopapa99@reddit

Delphi FTW

Reply

[-]

pfmiller0@reddit

If I'm using Visual Studio anyway I'd much rather go with C#. It shares most of these benefits of VB, but with the added benefit of not being VB.

Reply

[-]

Hopeful-Sir-2018@reddit

C# is the way to go IMO. But in case anyone is curious - the conversation is large enough that there's a [wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_C_Sharp_and_Visual_Basic_.NET) on it. Keeping in mind - this is .Net, not old school VB6 or older.

Reply

[-]

GrandpaOfYourKids@reddit

Oh man. You brought back memories. That's my first programming language I tried. I loved it, but looking back in time I don't think that it's good choice in today standards

Reply

[-]

mulberrific@reddit

Same here, I learned it when I was like 10. I loved to tinker with computers (software only) as a kid, and I got really excited when I found the Visual Basic dialog editor in Microsoft Word. I didn't even know the word "programming" back then, I just thought "heck yeah, I can make my own programs!!!" It's crazy to think that I might not be a programmer today if Microsoft Office didn't ship with what's basically an IDE.

Reply

[-]

GrandpaOfYourKids@reddit

Unfortunately I did not became programmer. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought. I mean I can program most things that I would like to but not in modern standards(project patterns etc.)

Reply

[-]

NotAUsefullDoctor@reddit

My first language was QBASIC, but VB was the first language I actually had fun writing applications in (I was 14 at the time, I think).

Reply

[-]

GrandpaOfYourKids@reddit

I was in elementary school when I started my journey. Started with batch but I wouldn call it programming language even tho it had some similarities

Reply

[-]

fuddlesworth@reddit

VB 6 was my first forray into programming on the PC. Made a lot of goofy and fun stuff.

Reply

[-]

frogic@reddit

I think python ate basic's lunch.

Reply

[-]

Objective-Cause-1564@reddit

Asm

Reply

[-]

iam_batman27@reddit

Ruby....and with rails its just perfect

Reply

[-]

StableDiffraction@reddit

the handwritten love letter... less and less

Reply

[-]

The--Will@reddit

HTML. People poopoo it because it’s a not even a programming language. I’d argue it’s a gateway language to programming and should get more respect.

Reply

[-]

blacai@reddit

F#

Reply

[-]

PrestigiousLaw7255@reddit

I love microsoft ocaml, if only it were anywhere near the popularity of microsoft java I would consider dotnet jobs.

Reply

[-]

blacai@reddit

Yeah, I mean. I enjoy using better ocaml. For my daily job I use better java and it's such a joy..

Reply

[-]

jmhimara@reddit

It should be way more popular than it is.

Reply

[-]

Wyl_Younghusband@reddit

Errr, not sure if underrated or just has limited application, but I want to learn more about Power FX. I hear it’s the language used for power automate which I am very interested in.

Reply

[-]

my_password_is______@reddit

R

Reply

[-]

dariusbiggs@reddit

Sather Dylan Erlang They need more love

Reply

[-]

yellowseptember@reddit

Erlang, despite being widespread. It’s used in Apple, most if not all Telecommunications, Amazon, Google, etc. And the reason is that: 1. Niche perception: Often seen as telecom-specific, limiting broader recognition. 2. Learning curve: Functional paradigm and syntax can be challenging for newcomers. 3. Limited marketing: Lacks extensive promotion compared to corporate-backed languages. 4. Indirect usage: Powers popular services (e.g., WhatsApp) without widespread awareness. 5. Focus on specific strengths: Excels in distributed systems, which are crucial but less visible. 6. Age: Developed in the 1980s, sometimes perceived as outdated despite updates. 7. Enterprise adoption: Less common in general enterprise software development. 8. Community size: Dedicated but smaller compared to mainstream languages. 9. Academic focus: Strong theoretical foundations can make it seem less practical. 10. Overshadowed by Elixir: Growing popularity of Elixir sometimes eclipses Erlang.

Reply

[-]

macoafi@reddit

My employer is planning to phase out Erlang, and I am sad about it.

Reply

[-]

Rythoka@reddit

Hopefully they just want to move to Elixir or Gleam!

Reply

[-]

macoafi@reddit

Sadly, we’ve been writing the replacement in rust for almost a year.

Reply

[-]

Rythoka@reddit

Wow, your employer is really living the meme. Rust is great too!

Reply

[-]

AbramKedge@reddit

I really liked Erlang when I first used it. The messaging system is very similar to what I developed in C to control a massively parallel interrupt-driven finite state machine. I used it before run-time error messages gave the file name and line number location of the fault. Debugging a problem took ten times longer than it should have, and was even worse when integrating code from multiple people. It promises effortless multi-threading across multiple servers, but all the documentation recommends using the standard library to avoid race conditions. When you drill right down into what's going on, the locking system almost entirely eliminates parallel execution. I still think I'd like to give Erlang another go sometime, see how it has progressed over the past dozen years.

Reply

[-]

_compile_driver@reddit

Haskell squeegeed my programming brain's 3rd eye wide open so that gets my vote.

Reply

[-]

BraveAnt5593@reddit

Julia

Reply

[-]

loblawslawcah@reddit

I don't think I've ever seen a job posting actually asking for Julia, in all the ds postings I've looked at. People actually use it? Why not just python / R? They already have a large swath of hyper optimized libraries Or am I missing something

Reply

[-]

Rythoka@reddit

I think it's used in academia quite a bit.

Reply

[-]

Infinite_Anybody_113@reddit

It is getting traction in the numerical analysis community. I think it will replace matlab soon but not python

Reply

[-]

South-Pudding7075@reddit

After using Julia for a while, It's such a pain to come back to do any data science stuff with Python

Reply

[-]

jmhimara@reddit

I would say most functional languages should be more popular than they are. Yes, there are downsides to FP, but in general it’s a much more pleasant way to code. What made the situation worse in recent years is that as soon as FP gained some traction, all the mainstream languages started copying features from FP, which slowed the progress of FP languages without making any meaningful progress in the FP style. Because it doesn’t matter how many FP features you add to C# or Java or python, it’s still an inferior experience.

Reply

[-]

AngryFace4@reddit

Zig and Elixir or Gleam (I personally prefer Gleam but Elixir has more eyes on it) they're not "hidden" or "secret" they're just new and haven't blown up yet. I think these languages will probably define our future.

Reply

[-]

jmhimara@reddit

Personally I don’t see what Gleam offers that F# doesn’t. I guess if you’re really want to run on Beam, that’s the choice, but i can’t say I see the appeal.

Reply

[-]

konektor@reddit

I can see the potential in Zig, too.

Reply

[-]

jymmyboi@reddit

I've been delving into some mobile dev and working with Flutter (Dart), really loving the way it works and the ecosystem within VSCode (Easy code refactoring). Slowly becoming a massive fanboy!

Reply

[-]

TrashyZedMain@reddit

Emo (the code consists of only emoticons)

Reply

[-]

Enough-Cartoonist-56@reddit

Commodore BASIC. 😏. But only because I’d rather kids getting into code weren’t using block editors, and booting into a terminal environment is treat.

Reply

[-]

Seaworthiness_Jolly@reddit

I this will sound crazy but from my perspective it’s C#. Every university teaches python or Java and yet when I go looking for jobs, so many more of them are c# based and yet I’ve learnt bugger all c# at uni.

Reply

[-]

Signal-Code-1471@reddit

[Newspeaklanguage.org](http://Newspeaklanguage.org)

Reply

[-]

Droidatopia@reddit

XSLT It lost a little luster when the broader industry dumped XML and replaced it with the drek that is JSON. I've been using it for code generation for about 15 years. It takes a little getting used to, but it allows for a lot of static polymorphism with templates. I use it with command-line tools. Broader program is in C#, read input, build intermediate XML in C#, then run the same XML file through a bunch of XSL transforms, one for each desired output file.

Reply

[-]

tintin10q@reddit

Sac It's getting love though from the compiler devs

Reply

[-]

Tall_Pawn@reddit

Because no one has mentioned it yet, I'm going with D (aka Dlang). I do mostly low-level and back-end stuff, so C factors heavily in a lot of my work. Which mostly is fine, I like it because it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. But of course string handling is painful. I often wished for something that is essentially just C, but with the addition of a full-fledged string class and typical string functions. And I found D, almost exactly what I wanted, plus a few other nice additions like hashes (associative arrays). If C mostly meets your needs but you hate being stuck with only primitive types, check out D.

Reply

[-]

Jjabrahams567@reddit

Perl

Reply

[-]

tav_stuff@reddit

Jai

Reply

[-]

branflakjak@reddit

OCaml. Feels like programming in cursive

Reply

[-]

No_Recognition2845@reddit

I loved Borland Pascal in the late 80's

Reply

[-]

Oleplug@reddit

COBOL has been around for decades. Don't know if much new stuff is being done with it, but it's still around and there are many current job listings for folks who know it. What do I like about it? Well I could probably write COBOL code to do what ever I want. Have seen it used on web pages (not kidding) for back end compatibility. As long as folks write code that keeps host system specific crap in separate modules, it is somewhat portable. Worked with a huge app called COMETS used in semiconductor manufacturing, 4m lines of COBOL on OpenVMS. Does all sorts of complicated stuff one might think can only be done in other languages.

Reply

[-]

Contains_nuts1@reddit

VBA - you can even use interfaces.

Reply

[-]

Specialist_Pitch_600@reddit

Haskell. It's a very intuitive language and quite beautiful

Reply

[-]

wizardkali@reddit

LISP: LISt Processor.

Reply

[-]

Pale_Height_1251@reddit

Smalltalk isn't underrated as such, in that people who know it tend to love it, but it doesn't get enough love in general.

Reply

[-]

BrandonEXE@reddit

The fact that I’ve only seen one comment mentioning it here shows just how underrated it is… Swift. Man, I really wish people would stop sleeping on this language. Outside of Apple development, it’s not really used for anything. But its just as expressive as other languages like Rust, Go, Java, and C#. No, you dont need Xcode to write Swift programs. No, you dont need a Mac to write Swift programs.

Reply

[-]

blereau95@reddit

Ruby for life

Reply

[-]

that_hsn_guy@reddit

Javascript

Reply

[-]

eldnikk@reddit

Clojure

Reply

[-]

jogglessshirting@reddit

How about the language of Love, amirite gals??

Reply

[-]

mogussee@reddit

Css.

Reply

[-]

3r2s4A4q@reddit

Q, really is the best scripting language and if it were open source it might be popular. python is utter trash compared to Q.

Reply

[-]

connorjpg@reddit

Go (sorta), or honestly Java. Both of these languages I really enjoy and the syntax just makes sense to me, plus they are both faster than interpreted languages. If you can get past the verbosity, they are fun to work with imo. (VSCode snippets are the greatest)

Reply

[-]

GoldFishDudeGuy@reddit

I'm still learning Java, but I'm starting to like it better the more I actually understand it

Reply

[-]

Pacotine-Universal@reddit

Java gets a lot of hate, but it's not an underrated language

Reply

[-]

connorjpg@reddit

True, but for currently new developers I would say it gets underrated and avoided like the plague. In the industry though it is WIDELY used, I can agree fully on that.

Reply

[-]

Pacotine-Universal@reddit

These new developers are simply following a trend, which I hope will eventually pass...

Reply

[-]

FlashBrightStar@reddit

You two are missing one big point. Java is hated only because most applications are stuck with version 8 (or even 5) which is very verbose and limitted. You can't use the modern features which makes the language more enjoyable - you have to live with design mistakes made back then. Btw some could argue that Pascal is underated and people followed Java hype train etc. It's completely normal that new languages are more welcomed by younger programmers as they make everything easier.

Reply

[-]

connorjpg@reddit

Well said. Cycle continues I guess. Haha

Reply

[-]

EODdoUbleU@reddit

The same thing has been said about Java since the beginning.

Reply

[-]

stupaoptimized@reddit

jq, a DSL and command line tool for handling JSON blobs.

Reply

[-]

WingZeroCoder@reddit

Crystal. I haven’t used it much, but the goals are “Ruby-style syntax, but compiled and fast”. As someone who holds Ruby’s syntax up on a pedestal as 🤌, I’m really rooting for it.

Reply

[-]

leobm@reddit

Unfortunately the compiler is lame as ass, at least where I last tested it. It just takes too long for me. Otherwise the language is really nice.

Reply

[-]

GoldFishDudeGuy@reddit

Yeah, the compiler could use some work, but I like the language itself

Reply

[-]

Kitchen-Top-1645@reddit

Assembly

Reply

[-]

minusmakes@reddit

Odin

Reply

[-]

someoneintheworld146@reddit

scratch

Reply

[-]

WillAdams@reddit

I would give a lot for a release of Scratch which: - was a stand-alone desktop application - allowed creating a standard graphical application w/ Windows, dialogs, buttons, &c.

Reply

[-]

00rb33k@reddit

Good ideas. A release that could produce editable python code would be cool too.

Reply

[-]

WillAdams@reddit

I'd be satisfied with a release of Blockly which was stand-alone and had support for making graphical objects --- I've had very good resuls with BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ I suppose I'll have to see if Nodezator is able to do that sort of thing one day.

Reply

[-]

thenamelessjohn@reddit

COBOL

Reply

[-]

Artificial_Light_45@reddit

I’d highly recommend checking out [pony](https://www.ponylang.io/); it definitely doesn’t get enough interest for how cool of a language it is. The high level of things that make it cool are: - it has built in capability security, which is a mode that helps to mitigate supply chain attacks by locking system permissions behind unforgeable runtime tokens - it utilises something called reference capabilities which are like rust’s aliasing model on steroids that let you program multithreaded applications very very easily - it’s guaranteed to be data-race free, deadlock free, and, notably, completely free of runtime exceptions - AOT compilation! No VM involved

Reply

[-]

putu420@reddit

BASIC

Reply

[-]

smugacademic@reddit

Hoon

Reply

[-]

whitebullet32@reddit

Qbasic

Reply

[-]

RobertDeveloper@reddit

Basic, it was the gateway drug to other more advanced programming languages for many.

Reply

[-]

belowaveragegrappler@reddit

Man I loved growing up with QBaaic

Reply

[-]

Smooth-Republic-6389@reddit

C-- is the greatest language, smokes c++, rust, c at the same time

Reply

[-]

LichterLichtus@reddit

Labview, hands down. Performant, parallel, intuitive. Its like learning the language of the arrival aliens. But sadly, many shit on it.

Reply

[-]

tiller_luna@reddit

C in context of learning CS. Some people call it "fancy assembly language", and there is reason to that. It doesn't explicitly *represent* low-level details, but if you know what you are doing, you can definitely look through the language and have *general idea* of what is going on in hardware for each block of code. Given its simplicity, general portability and omnipresence, learning it pays off in many ways later.

Reply

[-]

lost_opossum_@reddit

I wouldn't call C "fancy assembly language." Its far easier than that. It does let you "get at" the hardware in a way that other languages tend to wall off, which can be an advantage, not a disadvantage at all. I suppose this does make it easier to make some memory mistakes, but some things that are easy to do in C are nearly impossible to do in languages like BASIC or PASCAL because you have no control where in memory your program runs or less control about where in memory an actual structure resides, that some sort of hardware might need. I guess its all tradeoffs.

Reply

[-]

tiller_luna@reddit

I meant the "fancy assembly" as an informal derogatory description some people give it for the lack of thick runtime =D

Reply

[-]

Oleplug@reddit

Still supporting apps written in STD C on VAX VMS in the late 90's. Was one of the original developers. Not the best language for these financial apps, but it is very fast on the newer OpenVMS platforms. Much of the OS and layered products were written in C. I've coded in or worked apps on code in FORTRAN, RPG, ALC, COBOL, BASIC, DIBOL, BLISS, PASCAL, C, VB, PHP and PERL. Then there is JCL, DCL, sh, bsh, IFDL, TDF, STDL, SQLMOD, SQL, SQL+ too.

Reply

[-]

zippic@reddit

Commenting to get back to this

Reply

[-]

robbiu9@reddit

I think it’s C#

Reply

[-]

Xatraxalian@reddit

Rust. After you get it, nothing else is ever good enough. With Rust, if it compiles, it will work, as long as you didn't make any logic errors. (Getting to grips with Rust was easy for me because I've been raised on C and its pitfalls, and I always hoped for a language that could catch them by itself. Rust disallows anything I dislike in C; therefore I'll never return to C for any personal project.)

Reply

[-]

AndydeCleyre@reddit

Factor is beautiful, concise, and elegant, with a very cool interactive development "listener" and documentation browser.

Reply

[-]

potkor@reddit

[css and html](https://media1.tenor.com/m/-OKgyxpAYf0AAAAd/teletubbies-dipsy.gif)

Reply

[-]

Left_Somewhere_4188@reddit

I legitimately consider CSS the hardest language in the world, I just can't fucking get it

Reply

[-]

Darksorcen@reddit

APL guys !

Reply

[-]

AwabKhan@reddit

This is one of the right answers.

Reply

[-]

wirrexx@reddit

C#? Although my education was in python. The more I see and read about it c# the clearer it is for me.

Reply

[-]

AwabKhan@reddit

How is it underrated.

Reply

[-]

Pacyfist01@reddit

C# is not underrated. It's in Top10 most used languages in the world with a pretty optimistic upward trend. It's possible that it will overtake Java. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/)

Reply

[-]

frogic@reddit

I think it's underrated in public discussion. It's just very popular in enterprise and gaming.

Reply

[-]

Pacyfist01@reddit

Ah yes. Agreed. Poor people don't like it, because it's for the rich kids \^\_\^

Reply

[-]

Hopeful-Sir-2018@reddit

People don't like it because it's not special. It's jokingly called the "working persons language" because no one talks about their work. They talk about their fun side projects. .Net/C# is to the point that new "cool" features are WAY more rare now because it's evolved and caught up with most all the other "cool" stuff. It almost never does stuff first. It tries to do stuff best (which, funny enough, used to be Apple's angle...but FUCK Swift..). Basically CSharp is "boring". It's not for rich kids, quite the opposite. The IDE is free. SQL Server Express is free. Everything you need to do something is free. However, IIRC, the debugger isn't open source, I think. Microsoft does have a long and well known history for failing to keep up with their desktop stuff - which is why people are nervous with MAUI (which is still in the dog-shit phase, if I'm being honest). Blazor is in, what *I* would call, the Beta phase. It's ok, relatively solid for simple apps. Growing beyond simple - things can get difficult quick. WPF, WinForms, and [Avalonia](https://avaloniaui.net/) are currently there the good stuff is. WinForms, while old, still works quite well. WPF is better in several ways with a fair bit more compilated. I have no experience with Avalonia but I've heard good things about and it nothing bad, yet.

Reply

[-]

ArchReaper@reddit

>Poor people don't like it, because it's for the rich kids \^\_\^ Huh?

Reply

[-]

frogic@reddit

I think it's also that old .net wasn't great so it's got a bad rep. Plus being tied to windows. We use .net for a few projects at work and the difference in DX between old and new projects is night and day.

Reply

[-]

AdministrativeDisk28@reddit

Can confirm

Reply

[-]

lactobacilluss@reddit

Golang

Reply

[-]

brunogadaleta@reddit

Two very original languages: - https://www.red-lang.org/ (open source version of Rebol more or less). And successor https://ryelang.org/. These are concatenative proglang. - Unison: a set of very nice ideas around function structural hashing and nicely distributed. https://www.unison-lang.org/ Hth

Reply

[-]

HenryMisc@reddit

Lua - Incredibly simple and quite quick. Also it's used for configuring Neovim :)

Reply

[-]

KC918273645@reddit

C3

Reply

[-]

mierecat@reddit

Ruby

Reply

[-]

oldmanwillow21@reddit

Most of the languages here aren't underrated. If you want a real underdog, look no further than Perl.

Reply

[-]

cimmic@reddit

I generally don't think programming languages are underrated. Possibly Rust or R. Rust is not very accessible as a first language, so naturally fewer people use it, but it's a low level language with more user-friendly memory management than C and C++, which gives it a lot of potential. C++ is a great language as long as you are not Linus Torvalds is not your employer, but it's easy to accidentally make memory leaks, and in a big project, it will happen almost inevitably as even the best programmers make errors once in a while. R, I tried it once and decided I didn't want to learn it because it felt too unfamiliar too all other languages I've been working with. I imagine other people have had the same experience. I can't speak for its usefulness, but I know there are statistical programmers that are very happy with it, so it must have some potential that some of us are just a bit too stubborn to explore.

Reply

[-]

MathmoKiwi@reddit

Lisp and Julia

Reply

[-]

rodrigo-benenson@reddit

For web apps, Elm.

Reply

[-]

friday305@reddit

GO

Reply

[-]

Paghalay@reddit

Shakespeare programming language (SPL) because it’s so incredibly unfit for purpose but also fantastic that it exists.

Reply

[-]

Sufficient-Meet6127@reddit

Perl followed by Javascript for backend, data engineering, and devops

Reply

[-]

21955A6706@reddit

julia 😅

Reply

[-]

Firm_Ad7635@reddit

Ada

Reply

[-]

leobm@reddit

Rsku or Gleam

Reply

[-]

martin@reddit

English. Nothing can beat truly understanding the problem, how it was solved in the past, what people want vs. what they need, sometimes to the point where you can circumnavigate the problem space entirely. I know I'm being a little flip here, but nothing has saved more lines of code than good communication. Also, dare I say - excel? Yes, I'm ONE OF THOSE.

Reply

[-]

Kjaamor@reddit

It's more of an educational tool than a useful language in the way most people here are discussing things, but I really, really love 6502 assembly. I don't tend to put it on my CV, since it has very little practical use, but it's just so cool trying to solve problems within it, and even a quick dabble improved my understanding of computers no end. It's a rabbit hole, though. Programming games for the NES in 2024 is going to be a hard sell in a job interview.

Reply

[-]

Issue_Just@reddit

COBOL. Everything runs on COBOL. Without COBOL there is no modern world

Reply

[-]

AdministrativeDisk28@reddit

JavaScript and python

Reply

[-]

duncledave@reddit

Never heard of these. Will check them out.

Reply

[-]

AdministrativeDisk28@reddit

They’re a little quirky but they’re not bad

Reply

[-]

duncledave@reddit

Dunno if I have the time to invest in dead technologies but I'll see what YouTube has to offer.

Reply

[-]

probability_of_meme@reddit

The hidden gems of the programming world!

Reply

[-]

HighOptical@reddit

I'm loving Go but am sad to see it's just at about 13/14% use in the SO state survey. I know not everyone loves it because it doesn't go for bells and whistles but I just love its simplicity, clarity and the how well some things are implemented.

Reply

[-]

dnswblzo@reddit

> sad to see it's just at about 13/14% use in the SO state survey That's higher than I expected, and pretty impressive for a younger language. Industry adoption for new languages is slow. I believe TypeScript is the only language younger than Go that is higher than Go on the list. To save others a search: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular-technologies-language

Reply

[-]

fuddlesworth@reddit

Its simplicity is what makes it annoying to use. Ends up requiring a lot more code and workarounds to do the same thing in other languages.

Reply

[-]

RussianHacker1011101@reddit

C. Everything has already been written in C. There's a library for everything.

Reply

[-]

FistBus2786@reddit

C can now run on the web with Emscripten, which opens up new possibilities for the language. Though my fave language these days is probably Zig, it's like C if it were designed from scratch with modern sensibilities. It's very interoperable with C too.

Reply

[-]

USMCamp0811@reddit

Nix

Reply

[-]

heyitsme__@reddit

I think this looks neat. https://getlang.dev/ A query language for the web With built-in syntax for: * requests * selectors * parsers * javascript Fun & powerful data extraction in just a few lines of code!

Reply

[-]

RepresentativeOk9626@reddit

Ladder Logic. You can try and argue but you can thank Ladder logic for keeping your life comfortable and full of all the products you love.

Reply

[-]

Virtual_Name_4659@reddit

Dart was not bad

Reply

[-]

jack0fsometrades@reddit

Svelte! Although it’s a JS framework, it’s a dream to work with compared to the more popular Angular or React frameworks

Reply

[-]

eaglerockdude@reddit

Just IMO but I would only "love" a language that never changes and has new crap to learn.

Reply

[-]

CDawnkeeper@reddit

Ook! For obvious reason. ^^^^And ^^^^no. ^^^^I'm ^^^^not ^^^^serious

Reply

[-]

DeeJayCrawford@reddit

LabVIEW. It’s a cracking language for scientists and engineers who want to automated their hardware data acquisition.

Reply

[-]

UltraPoci@reddit

I'm looking into learning Elixir and it looks pretty cool. It's not really a niche language, it is pretty wide known, but it doesn't get as much as love other, newer kids on the block. Nim also seems pretty nice. I've never done anything with it so I'm surely no expert, but looking at the docs it seems a pretty cool language. Julia should probably be used a lot more nowdays instead of Python and Matlab. Gleam just reached 1.0 and it's looking good, hopefully it gets some steam.

Reply

[-]

axelcuda@reddit

🐍

Reply

[-]

smoofwah@reddit

Emojicode 😭

Reply