Well, I was thinking that it's possible to like a language in a very pure, abstract way- C# is a great example of that. Lambdas, LINQ, anonymous functions... it's a slick, slick language. If I'm looking at language alone, it's probably my favourite.But I can't do anywhere near as much with it.

I love Haskells purity -- simply because it is so audacious and so different from everything else. I love Lisps and how it made meta programming first class even though I will never be in a position to use it in my day to day work.

&#62; just because of the things I can do with itI am hard pressed to find a better reason to like a language or stack.

I love the Python ecosystem but I prefer Coffeescript as a language.  Guess I'll upvote both.

Which targets are you using?Wouldn't be awkward to use Haxe for a project that employed language specific APIs? It seems like the sweet spot would be using it to write basic libraries that had no external dependencies.

I agree.I'm not especially fond of the Haxe language, but it's Good Enough that I'm happy using it day to day.However, its ability to export to so many different targets (C++, Javascript [+ Node.js], Java in beta I believe, Flash SWF, AS3, Tamarin, PHP etc) is a real killer feature.Would that count towards this poll or not?

Being a little offtopic, but I have a personal pet peeve with ASP.NET MVC ... since they bothered to release it as open-source, why are they keeping Razor as a binary blob? Shit, why are they keeping ASP.NET itself as closed source?This is something that always bothered me about Microsoft-related stuff. Right now I'm using Python and Django for web development. I'm also using Ruby on Rails for a side project. Having access to the source code is vital for me as I've become accustomed to reading a lot of source code. And reading source-code for lack of better documentation is sweet, but then I went further and for instance I also copy/pasted a lot of snippets straight from Django's source code, or worked-around bugs by patching components.That's why I consider open-source to be superior, regardless of all the polish that Microsoft is able to apply to their products. I'm a software developer, not your average user. Just as a sports-car racer would find unacceptable the lack of access to the internals of her own car, I find unacceptable the lack of source-code that I can read, modify and distribute.

Oh, I know, and it is much better. But the whole stack is still heavy- compare setting up an ASP.NET MVC site and IIS to node.js's "http.createServer()". There's no comparison.

&#62; For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC is much, much less heavy than the original ASP.NETAnd thats if you even use that... I use 2 open source libraries to build web apps - Nancy &#38; Simple.Data - and they are both f'in amazing. This is about as "light" as you can be. I have a prezi presentation on my blog about using these libraries to build web apps for a few talks I gave at code conf's. (thinkdevcode.com)

But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.)For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC is much, much less heavy than the original ASP.NET (if that's what you're referring to). This is especially the case if you use the Razor syntax for your views.

NancyFx is pretty cool. I'm not thrilled with Mono's performance as a server app, however (and I wouldn't bother with a Windows server). I should note, though, that the GC seems a little questionable, though 2.11.0 apparently has made SGen production-ready so I need to look at that again.

You should try NancyFx (<a href="https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy</a>) some time. Its a light weight web framework. Simple and beautiful.

I find it difficult to divorce 'favourite language' from 'favourite stack'.I use C# a lot, and I love it. But it's tied into MS's heavy stack for web stuff (ASP.NET, etc.) so recently I've switched to using node.js and CoffeeScript in my projects. It's fantastic. So right now my favourite language is JavaScript/CoffeeScript, but just because of the things I can do with it.

Although most Rails devs code Ruby in a strikingly imperative way, those of us who did Ruby long before Rails tend to code it in a functional way.

My favorites:- Ruby for an imperative scripting language- Go for an imperative systems language (previously C)- Clojure as a functional language

nice to become a legal part of this awesome community :)

maybe some day I will finally become reddit user :D

How sad - down-voted to oblivion on your first comment.Quick tip to get the appropriate tone right. Don't post anything that sounds like a typical Reddit comment.

I finally created an account because of this :) Python FTW!

Agreed, same here. Go gets my love these days!

Same here, golang is my day to day language of choice now. The very large project I've just started I've selected Go! for.

I would have voted for Go. Agree, should be on the list.

Same here.Also obligatory #golang so people can search for it on the page! (Had to sift through every "x hours a&#60;go&#62; to find this thread.)

Looks like 'Go' is missing, 'Lisp' should probably be 'Common Lisp' since Scheme and Clojure are also 'Lisp'.

No. I tried it but it fails in two ways:1) all the libraries are it takes advantage of are written in Java and this doesn't fit the closure style of coding at all.2) the available tools just suck. Sorry, but without autocompletion the time it takes to write something balloons way, way too high.I guess 2 would have been less of an issue 20 years ago -- back then most of the IDEs that we use today did exist -- but it is not 20 years ago. It is now.

None. I like Lisp but it has its problem. I don't like Java but it is useful and it has good tools and a ton of libraries. I like C, but it needs better libraries and it can be a little cumbersome to write. I don't like C++, but there are cases where one of its features are useful.I hate PHP but it is easy to write a quick backend in which can be deployed everywhere. I hate Javascript, but it is hard to beat it in the browser.I summary I don't have a favorite language, they all kinda suck and kinda don't. It all depends on what I need to use them for.

Well C# is a great language, that runs very well everywhere (thanks to mono). I wouldn't ever dream of using ASP.NET but C# as a language is pretty nice.

That's a pretty substantial downside to C# for sure but it doesn't stop it from being a fantastic language. I can only imagine how popular it would be if MS supported non-Windows VMs (technically the CLR) directly.

The programming language described by standard ECMA-334 is, like most any other ECMA standard, non-proprietary, open for anyone to use, and not particularly tied to any one platform.There is of course a particular implementation of that language which is proprietary, closed source, and tied to a particular platform. However, this is not a particularly unique feature of the language. The same is also true of ECMA-262, ISO-1539, ISO-9899, ISO-10279, and many others.For its part, Mono is supported by the same people that design the Mono branch of the language/APIs. This is a quite robust fork of the platform, which includes a great many useful APIs which are specific to that version, and forms the foundation of popular tools such as the Unity game development framework.

&#62; As a pre-emptive strike, Mono does not make .NET any more "open". If Mono was maintained and supported by the same people that design the language/APIs I might change my tune.If Microsoft controlled both major implementations of C# and .Net, you'd consider that more open? Maybe you should think about that a little bit more.

Yeah, isn't it great that more people are backing a proprietary, closed source, Windows-centric technology?(As a pre-emptive strike, Mono does not make .NET any more "open". If Mono was maintained and supported by the same people that design the language/APIs I might change my tune.)

The number of C# votes makes me very happy. When I originally signed up oh.. 1333 days ago it felt like I was the only .Net dev on the site. It was a huge deal for me to find other startups built on .Net back then. Now I discover them far more often. I think Microsoft must be doing something right. I blame Scott Gu.

I voted for Python, but I would have voted for F# if it had been in the list. A good mix of strong language design (the ML pieces, plus some of the bits like workflows) and pragmatic utility (all those .Net libraries and such).I code mostly in C# for employment reasons, but I do personal code in F# or Python, depending on what kind of tools I need access to.

Perhaps a better question is “what is your most favored language?”. My favorite language is F# but my most favored language is C#. It’s like how a dog might favor a particular limb until the other fully heals.

Go Team Ruby! But on a serious note, I wonder how many of those are &#60; 2 years (I am) and were influenced by the Ruby community, a lot of which seemed to have hung around on HN for the same period of time.

I chose Smalltalk, not because its a language I get to use every day, or have even used a lot, but it has influenced two of the languages I'm most productive in, and from it has sprung foundational technologies which nearly all developers (especially those who program VM targeted languages) have been able to take advantage of.It was one of the first languages I used which really introduced me to a completely different way of problem solving and thinking about the structure of a program. I know that language was probably Lisp/Scheme for a lot of people, but for me it was Smalltalk. Implementing control structures without language keywords!? Operators implemented using the same message passing techniques as any other method call!? Querying any instance for its implementation and documentation at runtime!?

whats the one thing you don't like about your favorite languageThat's easy. So many hacker types dismiss you as some sort of weirdo for favoring anything that came from Microsoft.

That is easy -- non nullable objects. What I mean by that is that you can already specify that some numbers may be nullable. I would love to be able to specify that some objects cannot be null and have the type-checker verify it.Even better I would have an option type so that you never need to use null, ever.

I agree in large, but there are some rough edges.-It's wordy. The var keyword was a step in the right direction, but there's still a lot of redundant type information, even compared to other statically typed languages like Go or F#.-Legacy code. A lot of things that are concise and easy in C# 3.5+ were possible but hideous in older versions. Sadly, that code must still be maintained.-Null handling. Like another commenter, I wish the language would help more with null values. I'd love an operator to do monadic null coalescing: var foo = thing1.thing2.thing3.bar; Sometimes I want foo to be null if any of the chained objects are null.It's a pretty good language, though. I'm looking forward to the Roslyn API to the compiler: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh500769" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh500769</a>

C# programmer for a couple years, and I think C# is OK (it's definitely way ahead of Java or C++) but I've definitely got a big list of things I don't like about it. The top of it reads:- Events and properties aren't first-class, which is lame. I can't even easily get the "get" or "set" method of a property without either using reflection or making a wrapper lambda.- No syntax sugar for tuples.- No syntax sugar for destructuring anything. Come on now.- The type system has big holes. For example, I still can't specify class Something&#60;T&#62; where T : new(T) (i.e. where a copy constructor exists on T.) And I can't specify class Something&#60;T&#62; where T : /* is a numeric type */.- It would be nice if there were type inference on more things, like property and field types.- All reference types are nullable which sucks.

Yep. To me C# feels like the standout all-round language. It's not super-elegant, but it's modern and brings together a lot of useful features without messing up much. I especially like the stuff that was added in v3.0.On design alone, I would probably vote Clojure. The features and their rationale are very compelling.

&#60;i&#62;I honestly can't think of anything off the top of my head.&#60;/i&#62;Limited support in the open source ecosystem? Open source projects are reluctant to build on something that might infringe on an MS patent. That's what keeps me away from the language. To be fair, this is more an indictment of the patent system than C# itself.

Definitely agree with you on C#. It feels like this is what a standard, mature, widespread language should be. There are other languages that are better for specific tasks, but for the general programming language, C# really hits the sweet spot in terms of features, expressability, readability, and environment. This is the language that Java should have been--could have been.Also, I dread getting asked on my next interview "whats the one thing you don't like about your favorite language". I honestly can't think of anything off the top of my head. Granted, I've come across things that were frustrating at various times, but they never stick in my mind. I think that's a testament to how well the language has evolved.

I also feel like "Funcs" are a work around. What I like the most about C# is the fact that it keeps evolving and incorporating new paradigms (closures, lambdas, LINQ, etc)

Func&#60;T&#62; is just the type signature they use for lambdas. The syntax allows fully inline functions now:() =&#62; {
 DoSomething();
}No return value needed (compiles down to an Action&#60;T&#62; I think)

Yeah, C# tuples are a pretty glaring hack in an otherwise great, evolving language.

Try F# then, tuples, records, pattern matching, etc. It's essentially OCaml.net

Func&#60;T&#62; are part of expression trees.They are intended to manipulate the abstract syntax tree of lambda expressions. A bit like macros.You should only need to know about them if doing AST manipulations.

Eh, C# is good for the environment it lives in, but it's not without it's cruft.C#'s answer for all of its missing features seems to be a generic class. Don't have tuples? We'll give you Tuple&#60;T&#62;. Don't have inline functions? We'll give you Func&#60;T&#62;. It feels very tacked on (especially Func).

If code can be written by auto completion, it's by definition redundant and IMHO shouldn't be necessary in the first place.

I felt like I was more of a configuration engineer than software developer when I was working in VS. If I got stuck I would just start typing and then hit ctrl+space and scroll through intellisense to get the options that seemed to fit.

If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to try ReSharper. The automated refactoring and static analysis tools are best described as "pair programming with a genius robot".

I couldn't agree more. In fact, that is my single biggest problem with being a C# developer. Sounds counter-intuitive, right?Each time I dive into another language, I feel handcuffed because I don't have the features and options that I get from Visual Studio. Once the "new language smell" has worn off, I find myself wishing for faster ways to develop sections of code. I miss instant code compilation and validation. The ability to hop around sections of code, immediately find all references, or catch compile errors at a glance are all things I take for granted until they aren't there. And don't even get me started on ReSharper. Those guys at JetBrains are glorified drug dealers and I am one very hooked addict.All that said, it makes it very difficult for other languages to gain traction with me. At times, the software adventurer in me gets frustrated about this, but the pragmatic side of my personality (the one that likes food and a house) prevents me from giving up all those benefits.

if your IDE writes 30-40% of code for you it just means your language needs at least 30-40% more code than it should to cleanly describe the algorihtm. (not dissing C# here, just all IDE-aised languages)

Yes, but with Ruby or Python 60% of that code wouldn't even need to be written.

Writing C# code in Visual Studio feels almost like telepathy. Intellisense is so good that, it nearly writes 30-40% of total code.

Closure compiler is also very useful for making JS a bit more safe and fast<a href="https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/</a>

NuGet seems to help a bit, but granted it is not Maven.

What about Npanday(1)? Don't use it myself but the devs at work use it.1. <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/npanday/" rel="nofollow">http://incubator.apache.org/npanday/</a>

If only C# has Maven (that supports both Mono and .NET) and a solid cross-platform libraries, I'd leave everything behind.

I almost never log into HN (read it daily), but I felt compelled to put up a vote for C# because it makes me feel like I have super powers. As a solo developer, I get a lot of firepower from the MS stack, and C# is like the icing on the cake.  There, I said it.

How is this C#+.NET integration on mono?  Are the relevant low-level facilities translated well into linux or osx?

&#62; While the language is nice, there isn't a lot you can do with it in terms of productive development that you can't at least approximate in JavaThere is no substitute for lambdas :)

&#62; The .NET platform even has an implementation of tail recursion , now, though the C# compile will not generate IL that uses it, which makes it inaccessible for most people.Sort of. It just so happens that the tail call optimization does get used on x64 platforms because of an implementation detail of the 64-bit JIT.Source: <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davbr/archive/2007/06/20/tail-call-jit-conditions.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davbr/archive/2007/06/20/tail-call-j...</a>

&#62; It also feels so incredibly easy to call native code in C#. There's even a whole web site dedicated to making it easier, pinvoke.net!I'm with you that C# is really nice to use, but interfacing with native code is a nightmare. The reason why a whole bunch of websites exist on pinvoke is because of its poor documentation and incoherent behavior.As far as low level goes, I'm happy with C++ (if I were an embedded engineer I would say C but it is very nice to be allowed to use the C++ niceties). I think that everyone needs to have a language that can generate native code. On higher levels, python is fine for me. I simply do not have the use for an intermediate language like C# or Java, however nice they are.

I've spent most of my time in the open source world, and I would have to agree that C# on .NET feels like the most mature high-level software development tool I've ever used. C#'s biggest strength isn't the language. While the language is nice, there isn't a lot you can do with it in terms of productive development that you can't at least approximate in Java, especially with a good IDE to generate your boiler plate for you.Where C# and .NET really shines is in its native integration and low level facilities. How many other tools in the world let you debug a mixed application containing both native and managed code, all in the same IDE and in the same session, with the ability to set breakpoints in either area, view values, do memory watch points, and so on?It also feels so incredibly easy to call native code in C#. There's even a whole web site dedicated to making it easier, pinvoke.net!Lastly, C# itself contains several performance-sensitive features that have no JVM equivalent, including value types, unsigned integrals, and unsafe code with raw pointers. The .NET platform even has an implementation of tail recursion , now, though the C# compile will not generate IL that uses it, which makes it inaccessible for most people.When it comes to language design, C# is a little sloppy but it more than gets the job done. In terms of tools and low-level facilities for building a real-world application, C# on the Windows .NET platform feels absolutely world-class.For my favorite language, I of course, voted for Scala!

I just wish Microsoft would improve AOT compilation with NGen, or even better, provide native compilation as they do in Singularity with Bartok.

Is it still a good choice if you don't intend to deploy to Windows?

Have you worked with Firebug before? Webkit tools is a carbon copy. It is smoother of course, in the same way Chrome is more polished han Firefox.

&#62; We can thank the Webkit Tools team (including folks from both Apple and Google)webkit originally comes from the KDE project and was known as KHTML (with its KJS companion).. they basically showed the world that a decent HTML renderer can be written in nice-API-C++-code (Qt-style-nice-API) and with limited resources.how long did Mozilla take to make Netscapes ancient codebase usable? it took forever!and chrome+safari+android+iOS &#62;= 40% of the browser market. wow.anyway, lets also thank the KDE project that booted it. :)

If I wasn't using Google Chrome's web developer tools I'd probably consider JavaScript to be a nightmarish corpse of a language that punishes the slightest of typos with a silent malicious grin... Only by the grace of tools is JS tame at all+100000. We can thank the Webkit Tools team (including folks from both Apple and Google) for making the web platform environment as pleasant as it is. Kudos!

The new await/async in C# 5 is beautiful. Just try/catch around an await and suddenly async is easy to read and handle errors.

This makes me so happy to read. Honestly i love writing in c#. I spend a lot of my life now using php, but honestly the times when i followed best practices the best (unit tests all over the place, often test first approach) was when i was coding in c#. I think the language just lends itself, and the IDE...to doing things right.

&#62; How do you convert to a string? Convert.ToString().Actually, I think this is a bad example because oop is inadequate in this particular case. 
Converting something to something else perfectly fit the functional paradigm (take an argument, returns something, don't store anything). 
Why do you need a Convert object? How would you explain this to someone not familiar with C#.I think Console.WriteLine("hello"); is a better example.

I've only been here a few years, but how and why is this new?If you're implying that it has to do with the lack of visible scores, I'd point out that I think that the comments are still ordered by score, even if they aren't necessarily displayed.If it's just because of the sheer number of comments attached to the C# specific parent, I can't remember a time when a really popular comment didn't take up a larger share of space as more comments logically take up more space.I mean, there was the pre-pagination era, where you could just keep scrolling down, but that was also the era of HN crashing all too frequently.

I hate to hijack this comment, but this topic really highlights an issue with the HN comments. It is now virtually impossible to have any broader discussion since this thread filled the page. A topic that is massively more broad than discussion about C#.

The beauty of Ruby and Python is that you aren't restricted to an IDE in order to use them; I wouldn't enjoy using them if I was. I like to choose my own tools. This isn't quite so easy when using an all-encompassing (and platform specific) IDE like Visual Studio.I use tmux (with tmuxinator), with windows for my editor, shell, debugger, source control, logs. I'm able to, effortlessly, change any part of it.

Agreed, a good IDE goes a long way to make up for the sins of the language.

Pycharm is as powerful as Visual Studio IMHO. I love both of these IDE's.

I have to agree with this.  If only ruby or python had such a powerful development environment (sigh).  There's simply nothing in the open source community that rivals the beautiful, simple power of that IDE and language combination.  Tools matter when you're trying to ship code.

I don't think anyone will be pulling out C# marketing videos from their archives any time soon. Like AT&#38;T archives' the unix operating system <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749496" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749496</a>It will be interesting to see what happens with C# if Microsoft succeeds with Windows 8 on the desktop, tablet, and phone.

C# really feels like the most mature language that I've ever dealt with. Writing it feels clear, if something is wrong the debugger is very clear. The number of features that are there is incredible (especially post C# 2.0 when they added generics). Properties are delightful.How do you convert to a string? Convert.ToString(). How about an integer? Knowing only that one, it's what you'd expect!I also picked JavaScript because I am in a love affair with this weird little language. I also think it is one of the easiest languages to teach basic programming with (videos forthcoming).The amount of time it takes to whip up a five-cent program with javascript without even leaving my browser, heck without even leaving this tab is just astounding to me even after all these years.One thing I noticed though while writing this comment is that more than the language itself, the tools that I use while building things in the language are what really make them a pleasure to use. If I wasn't using Google Chrome's web developer tools I'd probably consider JavaScript to be a nightmarish corpse of a language that punishes the slightest of typos with a silent malicious grin, as code execution carries on as if A.blah = 5 and A.blsh = 5 were both equally worthy of existing to the JS compiler/interpreter. Only by the grace of tools is JS tame at all.

It is worth the observation that we can only really upvote the languages that we have used -- others simply aren't eligible for the 'favorite' moniker; even if we've seen a little code written in them, we haven't really felt them.So, like, JS was my second language. Ruby and Clojure have as yet proven impenetrable for me to learn, but I'm working on that. I have shell scripted and done plenty of PHP, Python, Matlab, and Java, and I learned Scheme when using SICP but I feel like I never have anything available when I'm writing in it -- I hear Haskell is much better at this. I have seen some Smalltalk and it looked very pretty, some C and I was able to trace through it but I felt nervous as hell. That's the extent of my education.My point is, out of this, the only stuff that I know well enough to choose my favorite is PHP, Python, Java, and JS. This poll cannot give a meaningful result for the question of "what languages are good?" without also asking everyone who responds: which languages have you written more than a hundred lines of code in? which have you read more than a hundred lines of code in? Then we could ask, "given those that have used X, how much has it been loved?" and get a measure of lovability.

3 votes for Shell script and none for Tcl? I guess every kind of insanity has its limits.

Nothing odd about it, IMHO. One of the things I think tech-oriented people consistently ignore is the role of emotion and the subconscious in decision making, even in what are nominally objective disciplines.  Our conclusions may be based on reason, but then where do our hypotheses and inspirations come from?

I'm the same way, though I feel like this flies in the face of reason. Switching to a less familiar language usually implies more headaches and less productivity, but the novelty makes it more enjoyable. Another example of how programming is oddly emotional.

No, I think you hit the nail head on. I almost often do quick little things in Perl out of laziness (even though Ruby would be so much prettier), but I also like Pascal/Delphi for static typing and relative speed. C is about as close to assembler as I'd care to come.But this "Java" thing keeps paying the bills for most of the last decade. I guess it doesn't do everything wrong. (as much as I'd like closures &#38; function pointers, tuples or even working destructors sometimes, I get by with Java)

Tradeoffs are a sign of a false dilemma; rather than choosing one solution or another, use them all where they work best. This is where Unix got it right all those years ago; Unix isn't just a slightly more stable platform for running today's bloated and monolithic software, rather, it's an elegant system for connecting maintainably-small utilities. The shell glues said utilities together into programs. Such an approach combines the best of high and low level programming, reuse and specificity, tradition and novelty, etc.I know shell isn't going to with this popularity contest, but a return to it is what's badly needed in CS today. Instead of attempting to recreate the shell in C# or Java's supplied libraries and subsequently becoming frustrated when interaction with the "outside world" is clumsily accomplished through an FFI pinhole, just use the shell as it was intended: as a lingua franca between utilities.Write what requires prolog in prolog, what requires c in c, what requires awk in awk, etc. Use flat file databases such as starbase or /rdb and avoid data prisons such as MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc. Make all of these utilities return sane return values and spit out JSON formatted output. Finally, tie it all together with shell. If you need a UI, code it as a thin layer in TCL/TK, python/pytk, ansi c/gtk, or, consider pdcurses, etc. Profile your program and find any weak links in the chain. Recode in a lower level language only when needed.Programming doesn't have to be hard. As in speech, the more one says, the less one means.

I feel likewise (except for the Perl part. I have the most fun working with PLT-Racket tools).I believe this happens because language design involves a lot of trade-offs, so every language incorporates these trade-offs.When one is comfortable in many kinds of languages, one is in a special position to see the trade-offs in the design of the language one is currently programming it.The way I see it is slightly different then the way you describe. Say I'm programming in Prolog, for instance.
In the beginning, I'll be like "Wow, such expressiveness". But inevitably I'll do something that is outside the scope of Prolog and it will be as slow as hell. That's when I think to myself: "if I could just fix this little part... I miss C". So when I'm back programming in C I'll think "now my code is fast", but then inevitably: "if I could just find a way to do this without so much repetition".In the end, it comes down as a "right tool for the job" thing. One possible ideal would be do the things Prolog is good at in Prolog, the things C is good at in C (and also throw in some Python, Erlang, Lisp, etc). Except most of the time this is infeasible. Working with FFIs suck. Sometimes there are no FFIs, sometimes there are many incompatible ones, and the dream of calling any language from any language is just further and further apart. And don't get me started on the pain that it is to have multiple runtimes with slightly different semantics...Even if it were possible, a developer would have to learn all these little languages enough to be working on them comfortably, and we all know this is not going to happen. So hardly anybody does this, as hiring someone for a polyglot project is a complete nightmare.

That's the right attitude. Each popular language has its strengths and shortcomings. As long as you enjoy it and get the job done, it's a good language. What I can't stand are people dissing other languages to make their language look good. It's like they have to justify their insecure choice of their language by bringing down the others.As for Perl, I used to hate Perl for its many arcane ways of doing the same thing, but I then forced myself to do some Perl scripts at a job and it's not too bad. It got the jobs done. Since then I've used Perl for many quick scripts.

It's exactly the same that happens with me, and i guess with most of the people. Besides, whenever i am programming in a new language, it happens that I gradually come to know more tricks, hacks and lower level details about the language which makes me like it even more. And, then it becomes my favorite language. And, then I can argue with someone over it. And then one day, I start writing hello_world in a new language, or one of the languages which i had not touched for many years and it becomes my favorite language. And then, i think how foolish it was of me! Btw, i voted for C because nothing is more beautiful than it IMHO; you can do whatever you want so elegantly that it mesmerizes me.

Writing good Perl is definitely a blast. Make sure to read Modern Perl.

I agree with this sentiment, and I voted for D because of what it is meant to be. They want it to support any paradigm, with any abstraction layer, and be useful in almost any context. I like that kind of freedom. Especially in a native compiled language.No, it is not there yet. The hope it that it one day will be. Because that would be amazing. It is already about as easy to write as Java, and usually beats it in performance.

I feel the same way, my problem is it usually starts while I'm learning a new language, so I might drop the current to pick up another, which I of course drop again etc. pp... I'm learning Haskell atm which seems to be the first language that captures my interest even after months. (the announcement of Julia made me think of dropping it, though)

It's funny. Every time I use a new language, or go back to an old favourite, it becomes my favorite language for a time. Static typing? Wonderful error messages! Dynamic typing? It does what I want! Functional programming? This is the future of programming! Object-oriented programming? I can describe the world! Low level? My code is fast. High level? My code is *expressive.Is this normal or is it just me? Don't you come to like, or love, a new language? Every time I do something different I realize how good things could be. But this is just a case of "the grass is greener on the other side" I guess.I ended up voting for Perl as it feels the most fun language. But ask me again in a month and you might get a different answer.

&#62; They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job.That's certainly a correct answer, but it's correct because it's almost tautological. 'The language that I like the most is the one that's best [for what I want to do]'. The issue is that, in this question, 'favorite' is a bit vague, and the task isn't specified. (This is why I have a problem choosing 'favorites'.)Despite that, in this situation, I interpret it to mean 'What [general-purpose] language has the best design?' Theoretically, a perfectly-designed language would be designed in such a way that it has an absolute advantage over all other languages for every type of task.Given that definition, it follows naturally that I would choose Lisp - it's actually not my strongest language, but even a novice Lisper can see that Lisp is both as minimal as possible and yet as powerful as possible . Since it's a shapeshifter of sorts, it can adapt itself perfectly to any setting.The drawbacks with Lisp (in my view) have nothing to do with the design of the language itself, but rather the environment. The libraries of languages like Perl and Python are much larger, by sheer fact that the community is larger. Lisp is cross-platform, but the installation (quicklisp aside) is still messier than Ruby's gem-based packaging or Python's eggs. And lastly, because most people don't learn functional programming as their first step, it's got a learning curve.But none of those are problems with the language itself - at least not the design of the language. (I'm assuming here that we're dealing with high-level languages - it wouldn't really make sense to compare x86 assembly to Python - if you're writing assembly, you probably have a very good reason, and Python isn't even on the table).So in the end, your answer to this all determines on how you interpret the question, so it's fun to see what the results are... just don't try and compare them directly - I think anybody who interpreted the question the way I did would probably choose Lisp, but it's clear from the comments that many other people interpret this a different way.(Thankfully HN is good at avoiding flamewars, but I'm sure everyone here has seen enough useless 'debate' of this same topic on other forums to understand why I mention it!)

I chose Java, but hackers shouldn't have a language that is their "favorite". They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job. I realize this may be an unrealistic task, but I try my best to do it. While I probably the best at coding Java(Quickest, and get the most done in it), I don't always use it because its not the best language for the job.

What makes me really happy is when I'm working on something new. Particularly science. Some sort of new kind of science.

FYI, canned reddit-esque responses don't go over too well here.

What kind of problems. Could you elaborate a bit please?

Mathematica. But not because of the language - it has some warts. But because of the problems I'm working on when I choose Mathematica as a tool.

No Go or haxe?Epic poll failure!Of the ones on the list, I'd say C# is my favorite language though I virtually never use it due to the practical and political problems that tie it to Microsoft.

<a href="http://www.cobol.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cobol.com/</a>

Same post from 6 hours ago. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745084" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745084</a>

I primarily use c# but I dont know if it is my favorite because that is what I get paid to write code in or if its because I know C#, Objective-C, VB, SQL, and a bit of C++.Of those languages, C# feels the most feature rich and easy to read, while I find working with the Cocoa framework and Objective-C particularly enjoyable. The others I work with but find no particular enjoyment from.

you write any more 100 lines and cannot eXpress your idea clearly with diagrams charts is a crap.

cause you don't have the ability to abstract things.

On my keyboard, it's between E and T, if you use a different layout, then I can't help you.

R is a delightful environment hobbled by a hideous language.

Every now and then, someone comes up with ideas to "improve" PHP. Some of those ideas are actually quite good. The only problem is that PHP is about as obsessed with backwards compatibility as Windows is. Good luck getting the devs to accept a feature that will break scripts written in PHP 3. (Yes, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but libraries like phpass actually do claim to work in PHP 3, 4, and 5 without modification.)

PHP is nice... but if I could improve it, I'd like it to be not quite so loosely typed. I would like to specify the datatypes.

I selected Forth, but Postscript was a lot funner. I have always wanted to sit down and create a cross between the two. Perl for short scripts (just because of CPAN and always have Perl installed) and Objective-C is my main application language.I gotta admit I miss Occam but it is over 20 years since I did any programming in it. I am currently researching agent based languages as I still have some Telescript documentation and have always been fascinated by the concept.

C# is great, it is even better with the vs.net, I found it is easier to express what I want to do in c# syntax. ASP.net is fine too, you can choose not to use the server control approach which I think is the bad part of asp.net

C#, the language, is not windows centric. The framework released by microsoft might be, but the language itself is decoupled from windows.

Given the audience on HN, it's not surprising to see Python and Ruby disproportionally upvoted. (For the record: 145 for Python, 114 for Ruby at the moment, next highest is C at 53). Coffeescript is also significantly overrepresented. It's currently on 34, beating C++ (29), and in the same region as C# and Java.What I am surprised at however is that C# and Java (37 and 35) are doing as well in this poll as they are. It seems that Java in particular is disliked here for it's heavy reliance on classes, classes everywhere, while C# is more approved of, but still disliked. Partially for the same reasons, but also for how Windows-centric it effectively is.I guess it shows that HN isn't as seperate from a typical subset from programmers as it appears from just reading articles that are upvoted, and reading comments.Personally, my favourite is Python, but between college and Android development, I've mostly been writing Java for the last few months. While I find that Android makes it less painful than applications using other big Java APIs (Swing for example), I'd still rather be writing Python.I also wonder how different the results of this poll would be from a similar poll asking "What language do you write in a daily basis?". I'd imagine Haskell and Coffeescript as the biggest losers in such a comparison, while I'd imagine that PHP would have the biggest gain.

Ok, who are the five people that said "Cobol"?  Show yourselves!  :)

Putting my vote on perl was important enough for me to finally create an account here after lurking for a year or so. Still on perl 5

I picked Python and Assembly. There was a day when C++ would have gotten the pick but not today. As for my reasons.Python, simple enough to explain why. I get to quickly make and test a program with a language that is well documented, comes with a tutorial that in my opinion was just as good at getting me into programming with Python as any other books I've found out there, and the growing libraries for AI based fields is very nice. Lately (doing the NLP class, and was using SimpleCV/OpenCV for another project.) I've grown to love it even more then before.As for why Assembly was my second runner up? One very simple, but hopefully thought provoking reason. Assembly Language was the absolute most simple yet complicated programming language I had ever dealt with, it taught me more about how and why computers do the things they do then anything else I learned about computers. (since I keep people's computers going as a living, it was extraordinarily helpful in making me a pro at fixing them.)

My favorites:- Ruby, because it's easy and straight forward with lot's of nice features- Python, because... I don't know. I just enjoy writing Python code :)

SQL is not really a programming language. PL/SQL is.

Voting me down for stating my preference ? Really ?

It depends what I'm trying to do.The question is like asking a carpenter what their favorite tool is.It'd be more enlightening to (somehow) ask what kinds of problems people apply each language to.

I love Ruby, but ultimately Python is my favorite.Ruby is consistent and cool, but I can do everything I want with Python and I can make it FAST as hell.Over the past week I've been moving some things into Cython and it has literally sped 200 times faster than Python which is 10 times faster than Ruby, and with a lot less memory overhead. Speed _does_ matter when the two languages are nearly the same in terms of development speed. Furthermore Python has more libraries and less wtf moments when looking at peoples code.

I am interesting in knowing at what time exactly would people think they have experienced enough language exposure to decide on the favorite one. Like, my favorite now is C, because thats the one I know best, and I cant say that this wont change, since I am learning Ruby and it rocks.

4clojure.com was very helpful for me, as was this: <a href="http://jkkramer.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/clojure-python-side-by-side/" rel="nofollow">http://jkkramer.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/clojure-python-side...</a>

I also switched from Python to Clojure. After picking up the syntax (there is almost none) I spent a few weeks reading the source of Ring by Mark McGranaghan [1] and constantly referring to ClojureDocs [2]. (My goal was to port Ring to Python [3], but after I did I realized I now knew Clojure and could just use Ring.)[1] Ring: <a href="https://github.com/mmcgrana/ring" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mmcgrana/ring</a>[2] ClojureDocs: <a href="http://clojuredocs.org" rel="nofollow">http://clojuredocs.org</a>[3] Pump: <a href="http://adeel.github.com/pump" rel="nofollow">http://adeel.github.com/pump</a>

if you just wanna get a feel for clojure without getting too serious - here's a demo of livecoding in overtone - <a href="http://vimeo.com/22798433" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/22798433</a>overtone comes with a stock emacs config that will get you livecoding in no time.after that, Joy of Clojure by Fogus. (edit: fwiw i have had no trouble with this book even as my first lisp, but i've been coding in a functional style for about 6 months before clojure)

A good start: <a href="http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html" rel="nofollow">http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html</a>Clojure force you to think and program in functional manner, where in Python you can skip FP. Thus learning Clojure IMHO will improve how you program in general. I am learning Clojure now for this purpose and I might not use it for real work.

If you just want to get a feel for Catholicism without getting too serious, you should leaf through 'In the Beginning'<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=a47neDIBaSkC&#38;printsec=frontcover&#38;dq=in+the+beginning+catholic+benedict&#38;hl=en&#38;sa=X&#38;ei=d0NuT_WnOcf30gGt_8XWBg&#38;ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&#38;q=in%20the%20beginning%20catholic%20benedict&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=a47neDIBaSkC&#38;printsec=f...</a>It starts assuming virtually no background in the faith and it really gets you into the nuts and bolts quickly.

If you don't mind my asking, as a Python person, how did you learn Clojure?I'm mostly programming in Python and JavaScript today, and I want to learn Clojure, but I keep seeing these very strange talks. I don't know how to articulate it, really. My best metaphor is, it feels a little like I wanted to go out and learn about Catholicism and they said, "oh, that's easy, we'll just have you sit in on a bunch of confessions and you'll figure it out in no time." People explain why they made certain language decisions and I (as yet) lack any of the background needed to know what the hell they're going on about.

&#62; I see a lot of votes for python, but a disproportionately small representation of python fans in the comments.This is probably because describing the virtues of Python (clean &#38; simple syntax, one right way to do everything, easy-to-use yet comprehensive standard library) just feels like beating a dead horse. Almost everybody in this community has heard of Python. The circle-jerk factor on HN is still somewhat low when it comes to this topic.I currently use Python personally and professionally, and I love having it as my go-to language. However, I'll be happy to add some more languages to my repertoire in the future.

I see a lot of votes for python, but a disproportionately small representation of python fans in the comments.If you asked me a year ago, I'dve said python. But lately, I've been using Clojure for personal projects, and it's making python seem just... boring. (I get the same feeling when I write in Ruby too)The "one right way" paradigm is a great one, and the language is solid. The built-ins are top-notch, and while not exactly a functional language, it's certainly expressive enough. In my mind, it's probably the ideal general-purpose language. But lately, I feel like I use it for everything because it's "good enough" for everything -- without being "great" at anything.Point? I don't think I had one, sorry. I just thought I'd share that notion to see if it resonated.

It's slightly depressing when a poll about favorite languages has 30+ options and your choice isn't there :-(+1 Groovy!

Its really a mix of erlang and python at this point. I love erlang for its error handling and concurrency performance. I love python for its easy to read factor, libraries, and simplicity.

You really might enjoy Groovy.  It's eerie how similar it is to Ruby and yet somehow it pulls off being nearly Java compatible at the source level (I know you won't believe that statement if you haven't tried it, at least I wouldn't).  It really is a kind of 'have your cake and eat it too' kind of language.

It's a fairly circumstantial question. If I had to pick one language for the rest of my life and could be asked to build all manner of applications, I'd pick Java. Otherwise it's ruby all the way - it's fun to work with, but has limits.

Perl becuase it does what I want.Haskell because it makes me do what I ought to do.

SQL isn't really general purpose programming language, it's hard to call it `programming' language at all. It doesn't really feel comparable to the other ones.Also Lisps could be merged into single entry since all shell languages are one.

If Coffeescript is on here, Moonscript should be added too: <a href="https://github.com/leafo/moonscript" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/leafo/moonscript</a>

I Love C, PHP. I also worked on Python long back during GSOC but did not get a chance to work on Python projects later. And after I started working on frontend, I have been a sucker for Javascript ever since!

AWK.  When I get to use it, that is.  It's not right for most problems, but when it is, it's a pleasure to use.

Python seems to have higher penetration outside career programmers. When I learned Ruby about a decade ago, there was this "Ruby shouldn't be your first language" sentiment. I think there's been progress on that front, but Python had an early lead.

I'm not quite ready to cast my vote for Python, but this statement is so true. Basically all of my notes from planning stages as well as algorithms I'm looking at or working on... might as well already be in the interpreter.

I never knew ruby was ever considered the "de facto language for automation". Maybe you are thinking of perl?

Python has been the de facto scripting language of choice for automation in a number of industries for quite some time.I don't believe (but correct me if I'm wrong) that Ruby has ever gained much traction outside of the software development world. Perhaps we're just seeing some natural consolidation.

Python is rapidly replacing ruby as the de facto scripting language for automation. It's also starting to replace Java as the language of choice for teaching programming and CS.

Some language generate a lot more noise then others--the noise is not at all correlated to actual usage or popularity.

<pre><code> &#62; ...go towards C (or occasionally even fortran) when I 
 &#62; need something faster
</code></pre>
Try cython next time.

I find that I'm rather productive in python for scientific computing and go towards C (or occasionally even fortran) when I need something faster. I also find that it has a rather shallow learning curve for students who come in knowing java...But generally, I think it's good to pick the right language for the right domain. I keep trying to find an excuse to learn Erlang ;&#62;

I was not expecting Python to be getting near as many votes as Ruby.It is my favorite language simply because the pseudocode I write on whiteboards is basically Python. Strangely, it has been since well before I really started using it regularly.

F#It's really fun to use; a bit like Python but with the benefit of static typing.

Moonscript (voted for Coffeescript and Lua). It's like Coffeescript for Lua instead of JavaScript, which is great of you need a fast and concise language to embed in another application (compiling the standard lua interpreter for a platform consists mostly of dragging the source to your IDE and compiling). ( <a href="http://moonscript.org/" rel="nofollow">http://moonscript.org/</a> )I also love OCaml (and miss it's static inferred typing and pattern matching everywhere else), but it's ecosystem has never fit with what I'm working on outside of coursework in it.

Mercury (<a href="http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/</a>), a strongly-typed, fast, relative of Prolog.

I am verymuch surprised that there are over 2x JavaScript votes than Java or C++

I prefer compiled over interpreted...but I prefer almost anything over C++!

people who prefer compiled to interpreted

Who are these masochists who are voting for C++?

Do people like Actionscript?  I've always felt like this language is only used when programmers have no other choice.

No Groovy? Seriously?!?? C'mon, man...Anyway, put me down for "Groovy" at the moment, although it could potentially be knocked off that perch at some point. I have some other languages I'm interested in exploring but haven't gotten deeply into yet.

Thanks!Yes, the overloading issue requires changes to both the parsing rules and some fairly tricky formal semantics changes as well. I've talked with Dave MacQueen about it in the past, and it didn't sound like something he was terribly averse to, just that it would take a long time to really get _right_. And then it places a burden on the SML implementations, though at this point that's really SML/NJ, MLton, and possibly Poly/ML (though I don't know that team very well yet).Unfortunately, the SML implementor community largely either moved on to other research projects after the implementation-y papers had been mined or left to work in finance (interestingly, it seems to be about 50/50, with the exception of a Googler or two). We don't really have anybody in research labs to do the kind of amazing full-time implementation, support, evangelism, and publication work that the Simons do so fabulously for Haskell!That said, as a researcher, having many more SML users would require us (particularly Manticore) to Get Real in ways that are not on the path to publication. And considering I'm already only going to have 7-ish publications when I graduate, I see a probable future locked behind the doors of Big Finance for myself as well...

Bless you! Standard ML is the closest thing we have to a perfect language, in my opinion. My only wish would be a solution to the non-extensible overloading issue, but to fix it without also fixing the formal semantics around it feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is why I haven't gotten into Felix or Mythryl.I mostly use Haskell myself. I find myself missing the laziness and purity when I use Standard ML, but I think the biggest obstacle for me is the shortage of libraries. I'm happy to use a language without a community, but compared to Haskell it feels a bit like a ghost town. Such a shame, it really is fantastic and would have been the perfect tool for building huge systems on.

Standard ML!Of course, I do research on Manticore (parallel dialect of Standard ML) and am one of the primary developers left on the SML/NJ implementation. So I'm a bit biased.But trying to be objective, the module system is absolutely amazing. It's a simple / small set of syntax with a formalized semantics that is powerful enough to do almost everything you want to do with generics, classes, macros, and other module systems.

Mesa and/or Modula3 was always a nice language to write in.

Yeah, Groovy really is an awesome all round language.  Nearly all the benefits of Java, Python &#38; Ruby rolled into one. And so easily embeddable into any Java app, you can use it just where you need it or everywhere.  It benchmarks substantially faster than Python and Ruby for the things I do, and it's really easy to optimize by just dropping into Java for anything that is a bottleneck which is far better than dropping to C and losing the all the benefits of living in a VM.

And don't forget groovy++ to easily achieve java like performance.

It's really a shame that Groovy is not even in this list. It's understandable as it is very poorly marketed, but it is really a shame that it is not mentioned more, especially on such a forum. For entrepreneurs, it has so many advantages. As productive as Ruby and Python, and yet running on performant Java runtime. Plus, being a derivative of the Java language, it makes it so easy to find experimented developers. It's my personal favorite, and I really think all entrepreneurs with a Java background should give it a try.

It changes all the time, and all languages have their merits and drawbacks. But I'd say Rust for now.

Python, because it lets me concentrate on what I want to do, and by default I think about algorithms in something that looks a lot like Python.Runner-ups:Clojure, because it's different and elegant.Javascript/java/c++ because sometimes it needs to work in browser/use some library/be fast.

It is quite surprising to see that Ruby and Python are the most criticized and also the most popular languages on HN.

I kind of wanted to vote for groovy. It's pretty much what you get if Java and Ruby had a baby and is a pleasant language to work with. Truthfully though, I like a lot of the languages on that list so it's hard to pick just one as a favorite.

I'm surprised to see such a low number of Fortran programmers. Are we really at the brink of extinction or are people from science and engineering not interested in all this kool new (hacker) stuff?

Surprised to see the poll includes coffee script amongst the list of these elite languages

C# is my favorite language, too bad I can't use it since I work at a Linux shop.

Perl, especially when parsing and manipulating text files. Still the best glue language between applications that don't like each other, such as when the output from one is incompatible with the input of the other (of course, vendor of second app promised it would be compatible). The only downside after perl saves the day is that it makes whoever decided to buy that application look far less bad than they deserve.

Favorite language, not to be confused with a language I can practically use yet. I love and voted for Haskell but for now my weapon of choice is Python.

I moved from Java to Python, hopefully I will never have to go back. Writing in python is a pleasure.
I do a lot of SQL too though I cant really say I like it.

I cannot understand why 180 people voted up PHP. It's the worth language I've ever tried.

Those days I feel (unless you write backends for Google or embedded sw) that "Python is all you need" (unfortunately - I wish I could work with more languages with equal productivity).

By voting for Scheme, I really mean Racket.

For me, there is a huge difference between programming languages I like, and what I can build with them. Clojure is my favourite, followed by Io. Both languages have a clean, minimalist aesthetic, are rediculesly powerful, and very expressive.When it comes to getting stuff done, Javascript is an interesting language, and there are some things about it I like a lot, but there are many things in it where a) there is syntax for things that make no sense (like the ~ operator), b) the syntax for something common and important is horribly clunky (like function, or assigning to a prototype), c) the syntax having odd rules that almost seem like little traps (like the way that () will call the previous line as a function, or how you need a trailing comma on everything in an object literal except for the last thing). All that being said, I love what I can do with it. And I really find that CSS/JS/Semantic HTML has some of the nicest seperation of concerns of any UI programming toolkit I have looked at. So when it comes to what I can build (and get paid to build), I would say my favorite language is javascript.

Have to admit that seeing PHP 2:1 over Lisp casts the HN audience in a much different light, though Haskell's fairly good showing is at least a little reassuring.

I just wish I could downvote. I'm looking at you, PHP.

Well... they're both popular, dynamic, object-oriented programming languages with a clean syntax. But that doesn't make them interchangeable. ;-)In general I find that Python is the easiest language for me to "think in", syntax-wise. It is almost pseudo-code in its simplicity, and I like that it has extremely powerful namespaces. It also seems to me that it's easier to write programs in Python which ignore object orientation in favor of a more functional style, than it is in Ruby. I'm slowly falling out of love with OOP, and Ruby loves its objects.I also really like Python's libraries for numerical and scientific work. For whatever reason, Python took off in the scientific community, and it's got libraries like NumPy and SciPy which I haven't seen duplicated in Ruby. It's also easy to integrate with existing Fortran and C libraries... and if you've done much work with Fortran, you know that it might be blazing fast but it's not the most pleasant thing to work in. Much nicer to glue it together with Python. :-)Where Ruby shines for me is in its libraries for server configuration and web development. I like Python's webdev libraries, but I still find it easier to work with Rails or Sinatra than with Django or Bottle. I also think that Chef is one of the best things ever for managing servers in a programmatic fashion, and for that you need Ruby.

I was under the impression that Python/Ruby were pretty much interchangeable. In what situations do you chose one over the other?

Python for when I'm "thinking in code", or doing data analysis that's not too performance sensitive (NumPy). I probably enjoy Python the most.Ruby for when I'm doing configuration management or occasional webdev.Fortran for when I'm doing serious computation, C for when I'm trying to do something fast that isn't number-crunching. (Though I'm trying to learn Go for that.)And a smattering of other languages (Perl, shell, Java, etc) for interacting with tools that speak those better than anything else.

I voted "other" because it is really impossible for me to name one. I just don't know enough.OCaml wins on fundamentals. Scheme also rocks as a language. That said, there's something exciting about being able to leverage the latest OS technologies and solve the hardest real-world problems, which is an asset for the leading JVM awesomenesses: Scala and Clojure. Java sucks but there's a lot of awesome stuff available in that ecosystem (if you're discriminating and tell the FactoryFactory crowd to consider careers in investment banking).I just got off a 3.5 month consulting gig and I'm really itching to buckle down on a hard Scala or Clojure project. I would probably vote for Scala because static typing is such a huge win on large systems where reading others' code is as important as writing new code. It actually makes reading others' code fun to have static typing, because you get automatic documentation of structure right away.

q (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28programming_language_from_Kx_Systems%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28programming_language_from_...</a>)!

I guess I'm making a fool out of myself right now... but C# comes before C++ in the alphabetic sorting order ;-)

Ruby looks nice.You better follow the best practices for Perl and it is like the other scripting languages. Check the Modern Perl book.My reason to prefer Perl is because it is fun and the culture is good. The business case for Perl is CPAN. E.g., check Moose and additions like <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~flora/MooseX-Declare-0.35/lib/MooseX/Declare.pm" rel="nofollow">http://search.cpan.org/~flora/MooseX-Declare-0.35/lib/MooseX...</a>

That's really surprising to me. Whenever I tried Perl it always turned into a painful mess. When I started using Ruby I felt it was the best of Perl and the best of ... Smalltalk I suppose — and I never looked back.Maybe I'm missing something about Perl?

Out of all the languages I've used (C/C++/Perl/Javascript/Erlang/Objective-C/Ruby)I like Perl the best and javascript+ruby the least.

Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?