Ask HN: What's the most underrated programming language?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272012

by mohitmun • 8 years ago

49 166 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Recently I started reading about erlang[1][2], And I started feeling why its not widely popular as python or go. Though I have very little knowledge about functional language and tradeoffs when it comes to using them. Just wanted to know more about it and any other languages which are underrated

[1]blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2011/ [2]https://stackoverflow.com/q/2708033/2577465

analognoise• 8 years ago

FreePascal/Lazarus.

mhd• 8 years ago

Modula-3

drKarl• 8 years ago

Have a look at Parallel U niverse's Quasar. It's q Java library that provides lightweight threads called fibers. They have some interesting older entries in their blog with benchmarka and comparisons to Akka etc

wdiamond• 8 years ago

javascript too pop to be noticed.

eksemplar2• 8 years ago

If by this you mean that it’s not taken as seriously because it’s pop, I agree. I’ve been seeing more and more node.js in the enterprise stack and in IoT for smartcity projects.

zdragnar• 8 years ago

I'd argue it's more misunderstood than underrated.

Given (historical) alternatives of flash and java:

Want some simple scripting on a web page? JavaScript, hands down

Want a full page takeover as an app? Java didn't make much sense here- the startup time was awful, and you might as well have literally just made a java desktop app. Flash too had limitations- you could (and I have) throw something together pretty quickly with flex, but the loss of the mobile market was unfortunate.

With that said, you are afforded many paradigms, from fully OO to fully functional (from GWT, to Angular, to React, to Purescript), with everything from static, compile time safety (typescript and flow) to runtime clojure-spec ish typing supporting ADTs (tcomb, io-ts, folktale, fantasyland).

There's canvas and webgl, but with the DOM having accessibility primitives built-in, you really don't need or want to go there unless you absolutely have to.

For every fault of the language, a third party came to the rescue- from module systems (require/amd => browserify/cjs => system/webpack/tsc/ => native modules) to macros (sweet.js) to DSLs (peg.js) to whatever you can think of, all on NPM (for better or worse).

There's a lot to hate about JS. There's a lot to love, if you give it a chance without carrying emotional baggage.

A lot of these things have absolutely ruined the modern web- I hate the popups on every news website wanting to send me push notifications, and every other blog pretending to be a SPA.

A lot of these things have made business advancements possible- I once took a downloadable part configurator app from a company, which could only be installed on windows, and converted it into a web site. Average quote turnaround went from 2-3 weeks to a salesperson could walk into a customer's office, walk them through the website on an iPad, and have a quote in 15 minutes.

JavaScript, and the web platform in general, have been maligned, misunderstood, inappropriately used, but it has also been a fundamental changing point in our usage of computers, in many cases for the better.

grawprog• 8 years ago

I liked lua when I used it. It didn't seem to get much love at the time, though I think it's more popular. It's got a few neat things and it's good for embedding. And I think maybe D doesn't get the appreciation it deserves but there's a bunch of reasons for that.

etiene3• 8 years ago

+1 to Lua, it is my favorite interpreted language. I like that the design is extremely clean and consistent, not to mention it is way faster than the alternatives.

ShannonAlther• 8 years ago

The luaJIT compiler[0] is stupendously good. Bob Nystrom, one of the developers for Dart, once said "Mike Pall [the developer] is a robot from the future"[1].

[0] http://luajit.org/luajit.html

[1] http://wren.io/performance.html

52-6F-622• 8 years ago

I kind of wish D would pick up. It's very familiar and clean, and a few things are remarkably easy and fun to do.

Though reading through issues and threads about it, and maybe high performance programmers using it have more than a few things to say about the state of the GC. I'm not sure if that's changed or not. I've only dabbled yet.

I'd like to see a community grow around it. It, or something like it, seems to me like the path a modern, low-level language should be going. It's not there yet, but in terms of the feature-set, optional safety, syntax, typing, etc, it's an attractive space.

segmondy2• 8 years ago

Prolog, Prolog, Prolog.

mr_overalls2• 8 years ago

Genuinely curious - does the need for logic programming often arise in general software development? Or do I have a narrow view of what Prolog is good for? (I've worked a few toy problems with Prolog back in uni, but don't actually know the language very well.)

segmondy2• 8 years ago

Logic programming is programming. It's like saying does the need for procedural or OOP or functional programming arise in software development.

It's a different style of programming, the mental state of the program when using prolog is to declare the rules that must hold true for the program to execute. You think less about state and more about logic.

In my opinion, here's what's amazing about this. There are programs that you might have a hard time solving via other means that you can easily solve with Prolog if you know the rule.

If you know the rules all you need to do is state the rules, and Prolog will find the solution for you. Besides being great for quick prototyping and application of rules. You can build complete systems with it. SwiProlog has HTTP, SSL, ODBC and even GUI support.

Null-Set• 8 years ago

Ada

eb0la• 8 years ago

I thought (back in the 2000's) that due to security reasons system programming would go from C to Ada...

... then Java happened.

friendly_chap• 8 years ago

I think it's Haskell.

I know sometimes it gets some hype but Haskell and its ilk is just so above the quality of any other language it's mind bending. Whenever a hard language design problem comes up in any new language, Haskell has solved it more than 2 decades ago.

The ecosystem (Hackage etc) is pretty bad though.

howToLearnSpark2• 8 years ago

that's so true. I woulnd't call it underrated though as it's pretty much one of the defacto starting programming languages universities use.

maxiepoo• 8 years ago

Where are you from that this is true? England? I think very few universities in the USA use Haskell in intro classes.

jjaredsimpson• 8 years ago

Haskell was the first language I learned that I actually loved in an irrational way. I consider myself to be a 3/10 haskeller because I've written a couple thousands lines, but never built anything "real" with it. But it is just such a beautiful experience to be writing it. It feels very much like a pit of success.

jstimpfle4• 8 years ago

why is the ecosystem bad? While no metrics for "underrated" are proposed here, I would say, empirically Haskell does not seem like your go-to language if you want to develop useful and maintainable software.

austenallred• 8 years ago

Sounds a bit like a chicken and egg problem.

ulrikrasmussen• 8 years ago

Stack (haskellstack.org) has pretty much solved the problems associated with building directly from Hackage though. The biggest pain when developing Haskell code continues to be the lack of good debugging facilities.

js83• 8 years ago

I am not really well versed in Haskell debugging, but a thought..

Current debuggers are built around very imperative notion of program state. I have breakpoints, I can look at variables (state in a given time)..

What would debugging look like if we looked at it from the functional perspective?

For example, execution "filters" instead of breakpoints. What happens if this function receives value that satisfies certain condition? Instead of variable watches, give out a breakdown of the data passed in and out from the function. Etc.

pka• 8 years ago

Yeah. Haskell is so imba people don't believe you when you tell them :)

It's understandable to show skepticism about "the new shiny thing" (although Haskell is > 30 years old) because most new shiny things turn out to be not that great after all. I've been struggling to communicate the "no, but really" distinction without much success to other people and it's frustrating.

(...for purely egoistical reasons though, I don't really care what people are using as long as I get to use a sane language in my day job, which is currently not the case.)

js83• 8 years ago

I agree, I think the diagram on page 12(?) of http://dev.stephendiehl.com/nearfuture.pdf sums it up nicely.

If you think this is smugness, look into it. The features that come up with GHC extensions have no equivalent in other languages, because the commonly used stuff in Haskell so far ahead.

saosebastiao2• 8 years ago

Haskell hasn't solved GUI design, and it probably never will unless it comes up with a better way of modeling mutable state.

js83• 8 years ago

What about FRP? I haven't tried it but in theory it very much reminds me of Qt (which I think today would be called "reactive"), and the Qt was probably the most pleasurable GUI toolkit to write in.

I think this has more to do with lack of polished UI editors (build tools) than with the language.

KasianFranks• 8 years ago

Tcl

jernfrost• 8 years ago

Probably not underrated but not very well known. I’d say Julia as it easily one of the best script languages.

But I’ve also wondered why D is not more widely used as it is a much nicer version of C++ and integrates fairly well with it.

Also a bit odd that OCaml and SML isn’t more widely used

dnautics• 8 years ago

I wouldn't use Julia for scripts because of its overhead. I wrote a udp packet flinger for work to test packet throughput in about 10 lines server, 10 lines client (yay!) But when I wanted to deploy to Amazon, the images took about an hour to build.

Generally speaking applicatio startup time in Julia is poor (maybe because of the number of symbols in Base?), I only recommend using it for its original purpose - mathematical computation - which, by the way, it's insanely good at and an absolute joy to code in.

codewritinfool• 8 years ago

Delphi

o2348diuu• 8 years ago

Nim. I understand some reasons for this, as I didn't pay attention to it very much for awhile myself. I think it's only the last year or two that it's reached maturity. Its primary alternatives also have the advantage of huge existing resource bases.

I'm someone who thinks there is room for lots of good languages, and each has its role, so I don't think languages should be pitted against one another necessarily.

However, with Nim you have something very similar to Python in its expressivity, but with performance comparable to things like Rust and C++. The metaprogramming is very well done as far as I've seen, and it seems very well thought out. It also has solid, useful compilation targets.

It just seems like the whole package for a lot of use cases and I'm not sure why it's not getting a lot more attention.

3pt14159• 8 years ago

I’ve used nim in production and I even wrote a very small part of the language itself; and it’s great in many ways, but unfortunately it lacks taste. When a language gets that complex it needs to be consistent and it needs to exhaustively cover use cases and nim is obviously better than C, no question, but it’s no Ruby. Maybe it will be one day, but for now having a smaller amount of features like Rust allows for a cleaner more cohesive picture and building on top of that is easier. Though I hate Rust’s syntax. Crystal looked promising for a while, but dev there is slow.

I still wish the coffeescript model had worked out where we could view or think about languages differently and compile them to a common one. But unfortunately it doesn’t work without a great deal of effort.

lj33• 8 years ago

unfortunately it lacks taste

Could you expand on that? I always thought the core nim language was fine. But, I've also come to the conclusion that the few libraries I've used that were written in nim are of poor quality. Is that a function of the language? The community? Or both? I have no idea.

vram223• 8 years ago

unfortunately it lacks taste

Taste is subjective ...

De gustibus non est disputandum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandu...

... so it is almost as though by default, you have to explain/justify your opinion on this :)

eeZah7Ux• 8 years ago

Multiple and optional GC methods, exception tracking, effect system, ability to generate C and JavaScript, C-to-Nim translation and wrapper generation.

Nim is underrated indeed.

jib• 8 years ago

I would have said erlang as well, or possibly smalltalk, but I guess it depends on how you define underrated.

hercynium2• 8 years ago

Smalltalk is definitely underrated. It can be an extremely productive language, and has built-in capabilities you won't find in any "mainstream" language that make coding in it very pleasant. :)

hercynium2• 8 years ago

This depends on your definition of "underrated" but I'd definitely throw Perl 5 into the ring here.

Edit: Specifically, Perl 5 + CPAN is what makes it so much better than many people think. The language itself is insanely flexible, which lends itself to extensions that greatly increase its expressiveness. IMO, if you start with Moose (from the CPAN) as part of your "core library" Perl 5 becomes a very powerful tool for writing very nice code, at any scale.

logfromblammo• 8 years ago

Lisp, and dialects like Scheme, Emacs Lisp, and Clojure.

farnsworthy• 8 years ago

Can we call SQL a programming language, or no? (I was trying to think of someone who's been around for a while, but maybe doesn't receive his just due.)

SQL seems to power nearly everything at some level, has much code written in other languages for the sole purpose of interfacing with it (for better or worse), has inspired other concepts and technologies (even as they are defined against it as what they are not), etc.

I don't think anybody mentioned C yet either, another foundational case…

gargravarr2• 8 years ago

Where SQL excels is working on vast batches of data without using loops. Once you can think in terms of datasets, it becomes very logical to process it all at once.

Nobody needs to mention C because it is definitely not underrated - it's earned its reputation and is respected/feared by developers everywhere!

rntz2• 8 years ago

If SQL deserves consideration for being "underrated", Datalog certainly does.

Compared to SQL, Datalog makes recursive queries very natural[1], making it good for manipulating graph-like structures. For example, here's reachability in a graph:

  reaches(X,Y) :- edge(X,Y).
  reaches(X,Z) :- edge(X,Y), reaches(Y,Z).

That was easy!

Variants of Datalog pop up in unexpected places. Datalog dialects are often used for implementing code analysers (e.g. Semmle). Datomic's product is a variety of Datalog with S-expression syntax. UC Berkeley has a Datalog-based research language called bloom (http://bloom-lang.net/faq/) aimed at implemented distributed systems. Datalog was also an influence on the recently-shuttered Eve (http://witheve.com/) project.

In its original form Datalog lacks aggregations, which is probably a big part of why it didn't catch on - aggregations are important! Still, some Datalog implementations add support for aggregations. Unlike SQL, Datalog never really became a standard; more an academic ideal than a practical tool. I think this is a shame.

While Datalog doesn't have a canonical practical implementation, in terms of impact on how people think about data query languages, I think it's an academic gem.

[1] SQL has recursive queries ("Recursive CTEs"), but they're neither widely used nor particularly well-supported in most SQL implementations - they're basically tacked on. This is partly because they're hard to optimize due to a lack of restrictions; with Recursive CTEs, SQL is Turing-complete. Datalog deliberately isn't, and there's a large literature on optimizing evaluation of recursive Datalog.

wizardofmysore• 8 years ago

Java is really underrated. It is popular but it isn't thought of as powerful or cool as compared to python, haskell etc.. I disagree.

a. Object oriented code done right is the best way to handle production code.

b. Java has introduced streams, lambdas etc.. has any other language shown this type of adaptation to times ?

c. Python, Ruby etc.. don't have equivalent performance

d. c++ obviously beats it on performance but I know the pain of porting c++ code

e. Most of the boilerplate code is either auto-generated or you can use Lombok type framework to generate them for you

f. Java made a really good comeback with Android

So the new kids in the block might not like Java because it isn't cool but Java has stood the test of time.

dmitriid3• 8 years ago

has any other language shown this type of adaptation to times

aloisdg• 8 years ago

Well C#? (and Android through Xamarin but I didnt use it so...)

icebraining• 8 years ago

b. Java has introduced streams, lambdas etc.. has any other language shown this type of adaptation to times ?

"Adaption to times"? Lambdas are older than Java itself. It was outdated in v1.

notyourwork• 8 years ago

I don't think lack of providing a feature because its exists makes a language out of date.

I think OPs point was that the language has evolved more dramatically than other popularly adopted languages.

eksemplar2• 8 years ago

Is it though? I work in the Danish public sector which is mostly windows based enterprise and 80-90% of our infrastructure runs on JAVA with no change in sight. Hell, most influential people will straight out laugh at the notion of JAVA losing steam. It did dip for a while some years back, but these days it’s frankly the strongest I’ve ever seen it.

Of course it’s not popular for hobby projects, startups, academia or data science, but those fields are frankly dwarfed by enterprise on the job market.

C# has a stronger hold in the private sector, but scince most of the public software is produced by the private sector even there JAVA runs strong.

virmundi2• 8 years ago

I've been banging this drum lately on HN too. Spring Boot makes Java fast, easy, and simple. Yes, you still have to install a JVM on your image, but there are plenty of management script out there to get a container or VPS running.

For people out there that look at all those getters and setters with contempt: you don't need them for your JSON objects. Just use public. The frameworks will still serialize and deserialize without issue. Use JSON annotations to define what a valid message is. Yes, you'll need a mapping layer between your JSON/inbound messages and your domain, but you need that anyway, otherwise your API is brittle.

JPA + Spring can lead to fast DB code and development time that rivals NoSQL with Postgres. You can have it autogenerate the DB during dev time with each boot, then create Liquibase migration documents for true devops stability.

After working with Go for a month, I really think Java just does things right. Servlet API is simple. Spring makes it easier. Transactional management + AOP is wonderful. So many cross-cutting concerns allow you to properly encapsulate and apply the logic in a few AOP. You just can't do that with GO without a lot of compiler work.

jrs956• 8 years ago

Personally I've had the exact opposite experience with Spring Boot. To me it feels like they've basically had to metaprogram their way out of the limitations of both the language and the underlying APIs which are extremely verbose and obtuse. Every time Spring makes something more convenient, it also removes some static guarantees. Dependency injection issues fail at runtime instead of compile time, but that's not anywhere near the worst of it.

Autoconfiguration in particular seems nice at first but can cause all sorts of weird issues. I once had a situation where we added RabbitMQ, and some other JAR started trying to bind to a queue that didn't exist, but the framework was swallowing that exception and it took hours of screwing around in the debugger to figure out what was going on. That sort of thing simply doesn't happen with Go in my experience. Or probably Dropwizard, honestly.

kodablah• 8 years ago

I agree with the answer of Java, but saying "object oriented [...] is the best way", "has any other language shown this type of adaptation to times", "etc.. don't have equivalent performance", etc is going to get you some flak. I don't agree with any of those statements.

As someone who has done a lot of Scala and Kotlin, I appreciate Java because I can anticipate the bytecode that will be generated. This is important to me on low-level JVM projects (profilers, fuzzers, etc).

zeveb• 8 years ago

Java has introduced streams, lambdas etc.. has any other language shown this type of adaptation to times?

Well, Lisp added CLOS, which was a huge adaptation to the rise of OOP. It also originated lambdas. I don't know if streams originated in Lisp, or if they were an adaptation from another language.

Most of the boilerplate code is either auto-generated or you can use Lombok type framework to generate them for you

That's why I prefer a homoïconic language: I can write & generate the boilerplate in the language itself.

Java made a really good comeback with Android

I don't know if that's true so much as there really aren't good options to Java on Android. I'd give my eye teeth for a good Go GUI SDK for Android, for example.

MarkMMullin2• 8 years ago

Agree 100% if you're implying Common LISP/CLOS as the most underrated.... it's fun to show people examples from the Art of the Metaobject Protocol and watch their heads explode :-)

statictype2• 8 years ago

Java's main strength is the jvm. C# as a language is superior to Java in pretty much every meaningful way.

All the things you mention about Java were done in C# and much more elegantly.

Where Java shines is not the language but the runtime behind it.

_RPM• 8 years ago

With C#, it's not _just_ the language. Typically, you'll pay for licensing costs of hosting the infrastructure required to run production grade C# applications. With Java, you can use open source infrastructure and servers.

mr_overalls2• 8 years ago

In addition to the jvm, Java's comprehensive system of libraries is simply not matched by .NET in my experience.

stonecolddevin• 8 years ago

I really wish C# had more battle tested linux usage. I really love that language.

bassman9000• 8 years ago

Runtime, and community.

jrs956• 8 years ago

Java
Object oriented code done right

Pick one.

But in all seriousness, Java is definitely underrated amongst many who are working with the trendier technologies. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done, and it's a solid platform with phenomenal tooling.

I don't think "Python, Ruby etc. don't have equivalent performance" is actually very important though. In practice, the availability of developers in a particular market, legacy code, and static typing & refactoring tools probably have much more to do with Java's success than performance.

cousin_it3• 8 years ago

Java has many features that are amazing for larger projects:

* Instant recompilation

* One string type

* One error handling system

* Capitalized identifier = class name = file name = imported name

* English names for everything and no operator overloading

All these are ignored by e.g. Haskell or Rust.

jrs956• 8 years ago

English names for everything

You mean like, AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean? Sure, it's English, but when you end up with a project with that many layers of needless abstraction, it's not going to be easily and quickly comprehensible by anyone who isn't already familiar with it.

mixmastamyk2• 8 years ago

Kotlin will get you these without the:

   Foo foo = new Foo();

Nonsense. Highly recommended.

singularity2001• 8 years ago

Kotlin will be huge once HelloWorld takes less then 8sec to compile

vram223• 8 years ago

Foo foo = new Foo();

The Golang FAQ calls that stuttering; good term, I thought.

https://golang.org/doc/faq

See section:

What are the guiding principles in the design?

"Stuttering (foo.Foo* myFoo = new(foo.Foo)) is reduced by simple type derivation using the := declare-and-initialize construct."

Spartan-S63• 8 years ago

The best answer to your point b is C++. It's shown a ton of adaptation to the times. Almost to a crazy extent as you see tons of new features hit in each standards revision (C++11, 14, 17, etc). To me, it keeps up more quickly than Java.

mark-r• 8 years ago

Maybe that's because it was so far behind to start with? And I'm finding it hard to keep up with all the changes. Some things just seem like they're awkwardly bolted on, like Lambdas.

kangoo1707• 8 years ago

To me it's Elixir. My company is a PHP shop, which results in complicated OOP stuffs (from most junior devs), as well as the inability to take advantage of concurrency. The syntax of PHP makes me sick just to look at.

jrs956• 8 years ago

PHP can be nice to look at. Laravel is a pretty good example of that: https://laravel.com/

AboutTheWhisles• 8 years ago

http://claylabs.com/clay/

Clay is a language that is no longer being developed, but it was a well designed substitute for C. It was built with templates in mind from the ground up and has modules, move semantics and no garbage collection.

Also Intel's ISPC. If you want real speed, ISPC makes it much more practical to take advantage of SIMD, though it seems not many people know about it.

arethuza• 8 years ago

PostScript - just because I had some mind bending fun with it years ago in NeWS & HyperNeWS

banashark• 8 years ago

Not underrated, but F# gets a lot of flack for what has proven an extremely usable and productive language.

* It is functional and succinct by default, but allows you to go mutable and fast when needed (see the alioth benchmarks).

* Open source culture

* The tooling (thanks to kcieslak and others) is fantastic

* Web story is covered well by suave/giraffe on the backend, with fable-elmish as a personal favorite if I need complex front-end functionality (most stuff I have is just regular pages though).

* Mobile story through Xamarin(Forms is not my favorite, but Native works fine) or Fable

* To mention javascript again, I think Fable has a ton of well thought out features compared to other transpiled languages

* Testing via expecto (and just github.com/haf in general)

* A whole wealth of libraries through .net integration

* I can compile a binary to execute on linux for easy deployments, or target osx to create convenience command line applications for my coworkers

There are some negatives (some C# interop gets inelegant, some tooling is left to the community as a responsibility, other minor things), but overall it has all of the important things.

thg• 8 years ago

Smalltalk

jordigh• 8 years ago

It really is a great successor to C++, with lots of new ideas taken from other languages too, and some very insightful language designers. I wish people would give it more of a chance and not stop at "it has a GC" and decide that this makes the whole language worthless.

It's been around for a while but hasn't gotten popular yet. I don't know if the weird license for the reference compiler is what slowed down adoption. At least for me, that's why I was hesitant to commit to D. After the license change, I've had so much fun with it.

virmundi2• 8 years ago

I argue it was the collection wars and few new books after the dust settled. You can't have the community split over which List implementation to use. Especially now when picking one side locks you into for the rest of that projects life and they are incompatible with the other collections.

nanny• 8 years ago

I wish people would give it more of a chance and not stop at "it has a GC" and decide that this makes the whole language worthless.

Seriously! I've never seen anyone complain that e.g. Go has a garbage collector, and Go's is not even optional. The only thing Go has over D is a large corporate sponsor.

lucozade3• 8 years ago

That's mostly because the Go folk stopped calling Go a systems language. And they did that pretty quickly after public launch precisely because of all the people pointing out it had a non-optional GC.

dmitriid3• 8 years ago

The only thing Go has over D is:

- predictable release process

- predictable language development

- predictable changes between versions

- clear direction

- no competing and non-interoperable standard libraries

- a backwards incompatible version 2 does not come out 6 months after version 1.0 deprecating it.

Oh. Wait. That wasn't just an "only" thing.

drakmail• 8 years ago

I think it's Crystal lang, it have a very nice syntax and performance compared to go / rust / c++

brudgers• 8 years ago

Excel.

hluska• 8 years ago

I'll say PHP because it's so underrated that I'm somewhat afraid to mention it here.

It's far from the most sane language I've ever used, and as much as I love it, I'll admit there are parts of the syntax that straight up hurt my soul. Yet, despite all the drawbacks, if I need to write something fast, PHP and a micro-framework (I like Slim) is always my first choice.

lj33• 8 years ago

I always did like PHP for quick, small things. It was convenient. That was back in the PHP 4 days, though. It all went downhill after they added OOP classes in PHP 5. What is considered best practices among the PHP community today makes PHP look almost exactly like Java, with all of Java's drawbacks and none of its benefits.

MarkMMullin2• 8 years ago

I simply must...https://toggl.com/programming-princess

cousin_it3• 8 years ago

Hey, I liked PHP too! But plopping strings from the HTTP request into the SQL query was icky. Is there something nice and modern I could use for stateless database-backed serverside apps with instant reload?

logicuce• 8 years ago

Having worked in lot of languages (most recently — Go), I can say PHP by far is the best to get the job done especially when it comes to web related stuff.

PHP let's you be what you want to be. If you are an architect with years of experience building a suite of microservices where you would want to use lot of bells and whistles, testing, dependency management, etc. do it. If you are a novice programmer looking to create your wedding website and have a simple contact form, do that as well!

Best part, each request is a clean start and independent.

briankelly• 8 years ago

I would say Erlang and OCaml are compared to Go despite being in a similar space and having particular advantages. It seems like Go gained traction over them largely due to Google's backing and having a Python-like philosophy of aesthetics - namely simplicity and readability over sophisticated features - and it seems like many Go developers came mostly from Python.

You can take my perception with a giant grain of salt though: I mostly write Scala these days, which has to be Go's polar opposite of popular languages in terms of design philosophy.

lettergram• 8 years ago

I really enjoy Ruby, Lua, and Lisp.

I find it interesting none of them are really used a ton in industry, but I've written my own Civ V and Civ VI mods (and helped other people with theirs). Lua is pretty much a pleasure to work with everytime.

Lisp is one of those odd balls, that is both prelevant, but also rarely seen in industry. My primary interaction has been with Scheme, Racket, and elisp. Wiring modes for Emacs is always fun (in elisp) and amazingly short, consise, and powerful.

Ruby is a dream, mostly I use it for Rails, but the whole ecosystem is well thought out and worth the time (what little you need) to put in. I've setup websites at scale in Ruby on Rails, with components written in Ruby inline C to make it much faster, an NLP library and much more (https://projectpiglet.com/). Better yet, I've seen non-programmers pick it up in a few weeks. Honestly, when I hear someone is developing an app in Springboot (Java) or some other webframework, I'll often show them they can complete their whole app in a couple days with Rails.

protomyth• 8 years ago

NewtonScript was certainly underrated. Its use of frames with persistence (Soup) with queries was eye opening. I also loved the ease of UI development due to a proper prototype-based framework.

A further development of F-Script should have been the successor to Objective-C instead of Swift. It was fun and its APL influences really complemented the Objectice-C / Smalltalk collections. It also respected Objective-C conventions.

dintech• 8 years ago

The Q Language: http://code.kx.com/q4m3/0_Overview/#00-the-evolution-of-q

gargravarr2• 8 years ago

I did some classes on the parallel language Occam-Pi back in uni. I really liked some of the designs - it's designed like a circuit diagram, with data flowing between segments in channels, and if no data is flowing, the channel and its attached segment blocks without consuming resources. It's also very easy to switch between series and parallel execution, and by designing it like an electrical circuit, it becomes possible to identify potential deadlocks and prove your program will function as expected. It's mostly an academic language, but it's worth looking at.

Philipp__• 8 years ago

Clojure. It’s built on top of JVM, it’s dynamically typed but it makes so much sense, it’s probably language that makes most sense out of dynamic type system. It really is language for solving problems, if you get past that initial brackets lisp barrier, it is amazing, very efficient and it feels really good to solve problems with it. I don’t know why but it just feels great to use it. Plus it has really nice tools for Emacs. I am learning it and really enjoy it, astonishingly powerful.

lazyjones• 8 years ago

The whole Wirth family of languages. They had clean, readable syntax, proper modularity, fast compilation, good performance, safety, productivity, GNU compilers. But they were shunned because people apparently didn't want to type "begin" and "end" and preferred unintelligible, clever tricks in C.

jstimpfle4• 8 years ago

I'm excited to do some more Pascal in the near future. From what I know about it I can attest to some of your points (fast compilation and performance). However I do consider the syntax one of the main points why I stick with it. It is elegant and extremely efficient, if you know how to use it. It is indeed quite clunky to have to write so many begins and ends (after all, there is typically one of them each 3 lines or so).

And you shouldn't use unintelligible, clever tricks in C, at all. They are very easy to avoid (although I agree that even K&R had some of those in it).

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favo...

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

dmitriid3• 8 years ago

Not just syntax. All of Wirth's languages are extremely poor languages with no possibility to grow them.

He was stuck in the structural programming world and never ever got out of it. Besides, there's no single ultimate Wirth programming language. All of them are re-hashes of each other with random additions thrown in (Modula, Pascal, Oberon, Active Oberon, Modula 2, you name it).

They are small fast programming languages. And that's about it.

EdwardCoffin• 8 years ago

All of them are re-hashes of each other

Or more charitably viewed, successive refinements consisting of collections of proven ideas, with the ideas that didn't pan out in earlier iterations left out, yielding a body of languages that have had wide influence.

danielvf5• 8 years ago

There once was a language that compiled in milliseconds - you pressed a single button and your changes were instantly in front of you. What's more a clever separation of data and code meant that this instant reload would show your newly compiled app with your data still in place, and you looking at the same screen as before, exactly where you had left it, except powered by your new code.

This separation between data and code also enabled trivial scaling for huge system, as well as the opposite - hundreds of apps, each belonging to a different customer could share the same system - decades before docker or k8 was born.

This language was written when Objects were the only thing people talked about. In a counter-cultural move, the language's author wrote the entire standard library as only functions. The language could be easily learned - just look at the list of functions for the one that does what you want.

It's cross platform - the user interfaces you build work on all platforms with a single codebase.

Its combination of scaling, quick development iterations, and ease of use powered the rise of fourth largest tech company in the world today. In fact, just a single app written in this language has more than a billion people using it every day.

Darkly, however, the name of this language may not be spoken here. Even by praising it obliquely, I risk censure, and my perceived value of my work being cut by eighty percent in penalty.

I will not name it.

mabynogy• 8 years ago

Smalltalk

danielvf5• 8 years ago

Nope! Smalltalk is a classy language. This is not regarded as classy language.

jackhack• 8 years ago

erlang.

Functional. Cross-platform (it has it's own vm, of course), instant deployment and hot rollback (via a/b images), etc.

Your puzzle-as-description was very cleverly written and an enjoyable exercise! Bravo!

danielvf5• 8 years ago

Cool guess! But that's still not it!

(Though I have used this language's hot reloading features to win a faux stock market trading war, by being able to swap in newly written market making strategies on the fly)

Here’s a hint - its been around since before flip phones, and has been a top ten language on stack overflow since the site was started.

lucozade3• 8 years ago

HN doesn't dislike Erlang. You only see unequivocal detestation for PHP and VB.

My guess would be PHP although there's a reasonable argument that most of the Fortune 500 runs on VB.

kujua• 8 years ago

I guess it is C++, the language I used for more than 10 years around the 90s.

lucozade3• 8 years ago

I can safely say that if it's C++, and changes are instantly in front of you, then it's not the C++ application I used to maintain.

Unless the definition of instantly has changed since I kicked the compile off.

elefantastisch• 8 years ago

The language is PHP.

The instant reload and not losing your place is because changes to the server do not affect what's in the browser.

Customers sharing a system works because you can just have directories of PHP files.

PHP was developed without any kind of object system.

PHP is completely cross-platform because the UI is in the browser.

PHP powered Facebook.

PHP has a very poor reputation here.

PHP is in the top 10 tags on StackOverflow.

danielvf5• 8 years ago

Bingo! You got it!

quickthrower24• 8 years ago

The instant reload and not losing your place is because changes to the server do not affect what's in the browser.

Nitpick:

That's a HTTP 'REST' feature, surely?

The feature then is that PHP doesn't chuck out your sessions because the code has changed. But then other platforms can do this.

howToLearnSpark2• 8 years ago

-> compiled in milliseconds

-> separation between data and code

-> trivial scaling for huge system

-> hundreds of apps, each belonging to a different customer could share the same system

-> decades before docker

-> standard library as only functions.

-> It's cross platform - the user interfaces you build work on all platforms with a single codebase.

-> this language has more than a billion people using it every day.

-> the name of this language may not be spoken here

can only be PHP

with_a_herring• 8 years ago

Is it Visual Basic ? VB is taboo in many tech communities.

quickthrower24• 8 years ago

Sounds a bit like Javascript, am I right?

rntz2• 8 years ago

I think Racket is underrated. (Dunno about "most underrated".)

It's a batteries-included Scheme/Lisp dialect with the best documentation I've ever seen, a state-of-the-art macro system, and a very friendly community. It has performance better than your typical dynamic language (Python, Ruby) though not as good as the highly optimized ones (Javascript V8, LuaJIT).

kamaal4• 8 years ago

Just to add to your comment, DrRacket is a very wonderful IDE.

dblotsky• 8 years ago

Often people don’t learn anything about a language’s internals, or a computer’s internals, when they learn a “nice” language with garbage collection and dynamic typing and massages. IMO for long-term software engineering that stuff is important to know.

Many see C as this old, outdated, uncool language, and never even realise that so many other languages are written in it.

But really, when it comes to perf and correctness, it’s still king:

- Often you can try to optimize a simple python program to make it run faster... or you can rewrite it in C and get a 1000x boost for free

- It has compilers that have proofs of correctness

- There are many tools that can prove a C program’s correctness

- It’s still the best way (IMO) to learn how the computer works while learning the language

- It doesn’t have OOP (which makes me sad), but you can get there by writing C++ as “C with classes”

- It probably has the most job security guarantees of any language: it will be a looooong time before C goes away

- It’s so standard and supported, programs from 40 years ago still run today; I don’t know if you can say that about any other language (except like, COBOL)

jstimpfle4• 8 years ago

I get much of the effortless correctness (at least the "seems to work" type of correctness) by not trying to do OOP. Frankly that's a mess, especially when trying to emulate it in C.

Instead I use simple data table driven control flow, global state, etc.

52-6F-622• 8 years ago

I'm presently working my way through Kernighan and Ritchie, and the more I dig in, the more I enjoy it.

I love the large feature sets with some other languages for certain projects, but the small size of C makes it easy to wrap one's head around the basics. The extended learning comes from problem solving due to specific limitations.

My biggest beef is probably a little to do with number sizes (64b ++), but I just haven't learned the best method for dealing with them.

I'd dabbled in it before, but this book really does open it up wide.

And the potential for working with embedded devices in a more profound way, it can't really be beat, no?

dsr_• 8 years ago

Nobody loves Perl, but it holds the world together.

Perl is happily unoptimized for anything, and is usable for nearly everything. It's easy to write and easy to make it hard to read.

You can write Lisp in Perl, and some people insist on it.

The CPAN repository has a module for nearly everything, and an amazingly high percentage are well documented.

There are some weirdos who love Perl.

senorsmile• 8 years ago

I love perl. I also love Haskell and Python, but Perl was my first love.

kamaal4• 8 years ago

Perl is basically lisp for Pirates who got banished using Lisp in production environments.

No other language has done more to carry the Lisp legacy forward than Perl.

etiene3• 8 years ago

I don't like perl a lot exactly because it's easy to make it hard to read, but I gotta give that CPAN is the best language specific package manager I've ever encountered.

ajbetteridge• 8 years ago

I strongly disagree that CPAN is the best package manager. The CPAN repository might be one of the largest for a specific language, but the cpan comnand line is aegul, you can't even remove a package automatically with it. Don't get me wrong, because I love Perl, it was my main language for 10+ years, but the default package manger us awful.

notacoward• 8 years ago

I'm going to riff on what Null-Set said about Ada, which people like to criticize for its complexity but which actually solved a lot of hard problems in very creditable fashion for its day. The complexity complaints are a joke, considering that that both Java and C++ have since become more complex than Ada ever was by trying to solve some of the same problems -and in C++'s case largely failing. If Ada (or its relative Modula) were introduced today, it would seem like a breath of fresh air compared to those two.

Special runner-up: MOOcode, the native language of LambdaMOO. Still one of the most coherent and pleasant object-oriented languages I've used. It's especially notable for its "code runs as author not invoker" protection model and call-stack introspection. People could learn a lot from that.

My first thought was Nim, and o2348diuu already explained why. Second thought was Lua, but a couple of people beat me to that. Haskell and Elixir are definitely not underrated. They're underused, certainly, but that's not the same thing and IMO Haskell is often overrated.

etiene3• 8 years ago

My thoughts exactly on the difference on underrated and underused. Lua is quite widespread in the industry in sneaky ways. It just doesn't get the love it deserves.

vram223• 8 years ago

Do you know of some example areas, other than games and nginx/OpenResty? (IIRC it is used in the latter.)

TimJYoung2• 8 years ago

Object Pascal (FreePascal/Lazarus/Delphi)

Many, many production applications have been written using these languages/environments, but the language has fallen out of favor since the early 2000s.

- Code is easy to read and understand, and you can get a new developer up to speed quickly

- Can be used as a high-level language, a low-level language (you can even include in-line assembler), or both

- Blazing fast compilation

- Statically-typed, and includes classes, records (structs), reference-counted interfaces and strings

- Lots of implementations and platforms

jetti• 8 years ago

I started picking Object Pascal up (FreePascal & Delphi varieties) and was amazed by it. It is rather simple and compiles to native code. Not only that, you can create mobile apps (and even macOS apps) with both Delphi and FreePascal.

TimJYoung2• 8 years ago

I'm glad that you're liking it - it's a very "approachable" language. I discovered it 20+ years ago, and never looked back. I've written all sorts of software with it: manufacturing order entry configurators, payroll software, application servers, database engines/servers, ODBC drivers, .NET data providers, compilers, and a web application development IDE.

If you're looking to do web development (browser) with Object Pascal, then here's a shameless plug for our product, Elevate Web Builder:

https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb&type=web

BrandoElFollito3• 8 years ago

I spent nights on Pascal (Borland) coding a Conway's game of life on an IBM PC as a student. One of fondest memories from 1990 I think.

It was a great language, the first real one I learned.

kamaal4• 8 years ago

Lisp.

Its the most powerful language that has been in existence and yet most modern programmers haven't heard about it or used it.

Almost everything to do with the ecosystem is magic, and its not even a programming language by many a measure, its a thinking paradigm so powerful that it could make many things that look impossible a walk in the park. I've only been learning it for more than a month now, and this is what I've seen.

1. Unmatchable features when it comes to modifying structured data of any kind. Many eons ago our foregeeks seemed to have imagined everything in computer science as either a list or combination of lists on somekind. Tree, Queues, Heaps, Stacks, Vectors, Graphs, Sequences, Sets... You name it, these are all lists or a combination of lists. The programs too are lists(abstract syntax trees). Most modern day data structures you will will deal with XML, JSON, Tables, Matrices are lists or a combination of lists. And lisp is list processing. Once you get a hold of lisp and its paradigm of thought, even difficult algorithms and data structures feel like a walk in the park. I used to struggle with white board coding and algorithm stuff, these day most of it comes to me naturally or little work, when I think of it in terms of lisp paradigm.

2. Recursion: For some reason, its very easy to think recursively in lisp. And that makes very easy to represent hard solutions.

3. Functional programming: Full functional programming features, no holds barred.

4. REPL: If you haven't used the Lisp REPL, you haven't seen a real REPL yet. I was completely blown away by the REPL. Combination of Emacs + SLIME is just too good. And you can hot swap code by attaching to a live process. Which is totally insane.

4. Continuations: Makes it very easy to express a variety backtracking problems.

5. Macros: Ability to extend and add any language feature and paradigm you want, at compile time at 0 costs. And anything you add becomes a part of the language.

6. Libraries: Most lisps these days have libraries for most of the needs.

7. Books: Lisp easily has the most eccentric, fun and enlightening books in all of CS history.

When you code in lisp it feels you are dropping tiny little recursive functions all over the place which grow like a small organism to a very intelligent being.

This is closest I have to come to programming Nirvana so far. The last time before this was when I used Perl.

btschaegg• 8 years ago

I strongly concur with this. I'd like to point a very specific thing out, which you only implicitly refer to:

  homoiconicity

Anything else, you can pretty much bolt onto any other language, but that will never happen with homoiconicity. The language has to be built with it in mind, or you won't get it. Ever. It boggles my mind that there are almost no non-lisp-like languages that try to do this. If I had to guess, I'd assume that any language like this that could have been concieved was so similar to Lisp that it just wasn't worth reinventing the wheel.

It still makes me wonder though - here we are, the concept is 50 years old, and we're still bolting lexers together.

kamaal4• 8 years ago

I think Perl 6 has this concept of using the language to modify itself. Not exactly through homoiconicity, but the concept is somewhat similar.

kazinator• 8 years ago

Homoiconicity just means that procedures are stored in the same representation in which they are entered, or nearly (modulo tokenization and such). It was defined that way by the programmer who coined the term in the 1960's, and is well documented in the Wikipedia.

POSIX shells are homoiconic; you can type set to see all the functions, which are printed in reformatted source code, that you can copy and paste.

That could work in any interpreted language. Classic line number BASIC is homoiconic. You can LIST the lines of code.

A Lisp is useful even if it isn't homoiconic (functions cannot be edited). ANSI Lisp has some loosely defined support for homoiconicity via the ed function. This isn't used much; actual Lisp environments have other means to recall and edit a function definition, such as an IDE with buffers or REPL with history.

The term homoiconic doesn't really "nail it" when it comes to Lisp.

IshKebab• 8 years ago

I would say Ceylon. Ok I never used it, but it looks like it has one of the cleanest type systems ever, and flow-based typing is a really clever idea that isn't really in any other languages.

Sad that it has been abandoned by Red Hat.

peterhi• 8 years ago

Icon was a language I used in my youth. It took me a long time to unlearn some of the very neat features of the language.

if 1 <= x < 99 rather than if 1 <= x && x < 99 and a host of much more natural expressions

BrandoElFollito3• 8 years ago

This is one of the things I like in Python

dvfjsdhgfv• 8 years ago

D - it could be a replacement for many languages right now, and in many aspects is superior to Go, but since it lacks a big brand behind it, people are afraid to use it (although some do, successfully).

Another one is Nim, with great potential, but still some rough edges here and there.

Last but not least: Red. If this language gains momentum, it will change the game forever. The current implementation take the concept of cross-compilation to a new level (although the current lack of View on Linux is somehow disappointing.)

SAI_Peregrinus• 8 years ago

Forth. It's a procedural language stripped down to the absolute minimum amount of syntax. Somewhat like what lisp is to functional languages. Its low level and minimal overhead make it excellent for highly constrained embedded systems.

henrikeh2• 8 years ago

And absolute joy to implement! If anyone is curious: pick up "Threaded interpretive language" by R. G. Loeliger. It is old and only describes one kind of kinda-Forth -- but in a few readable lines of assembly and some neat memory structures you have an interpreted language.

AstralStorm• 8 years ago

Fortran. 60+ years and still useful code used widely thanks to netlib and certain BLAS implementations.

Has many superb (proprietary) compilers and handles math like it is nobody business without having to drop into manual vectorization tricks like C and C++.

Given good variable naming convention it is quite readable too. It is still being developed and enhanced as a language.

BrandoElFollito3• 8 years ago

But only quite. As a physicist I had to deal with FORTRAN and moving to C was such a relief (just this sentence shows the amount of pain).

The next generation with their pandas is spoiled.

henrikeh2• 8 years ago

Wolfram Language / Mathematica. Probably not "underrated" since it is backed by an entire company with the sole purpose of developing it -- but as a programming language it is absolutely underappreciated.

* Essentially a Lisp. Data and program can be freely interchanged and is frequently done in completely normal code.

* The most impressive "standard" "library" in existence: everything from symbolic calculus, machine learning, UI building, graphics, signal processing, data import and export, foreign function interfaces and it just goes on and on.

* Incredible attention to consistency and interoperability. Everything behaves in predictable and orthogonal fashions. Right from the low-level pattern matching up to interacting with the build in database.

* The best documentation of any programming language. Nothing compares even slightly in breath, friendliness, consistency.

RandomSort• 8 years ago

I'm going to say Groovy. It allows you to do all the nifty things Java does, but you just feel infinitely more productive.

ktkization• 8 years ago

Grails is an amazing powerful web framework. Favorite feature of it is GORM. Quite expressive

vorg• 8 years ago

Apache Groovy brought closures to the JVM in its day, something no other JVM language had at the time, kudos to its creator James Strachan who was dissatisfied with Beanshell. Now that Java 8, Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure also brought closures/lambdas mainstream, I'm not really sure what unique proposition Groovy brings to the JVM any more.

mping• 8 years ago

Programming language != runtime. Erlang-the-language is pretty flaky, but the VM where it runs (plus OTP) is pretty insane.

Same for Java, the language itself is pretty boring, but the runtime (JVM) is great.

C# is the opposite, the language is great but the tooling and runtime are not there yet.

janeroe• 8 years ago

Did anyone mention parasail? It's a statically typed programming language with region based memory management, builtin parallelism of every expression, and a number of other quite entertaining design decisions. I think it's a shame nobody has heard about it.

quickthrower24• 8 years ago

English.

You can write your requirements in this language, then send to a programmer to convert them to code.

Ask HN: What's the most underrated programming language?

Related Stories