One (programming) language for the rest of your life. Which one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96423

by watmough • 19 years ago

19 82 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you had to pick one single computer language to use from now until the end of time, which one would you pick? What qualities are you looking for? What are your programming goals?

If you like, you can specify a platform or libraries if they colored your choice of language.

cperciva• 19 years ago

C99. It can do everything I want, and while there are some tasks for which it's not the ideal language, I can write my own libraries to supplement the existing ones.

If I'm going to be stuck with only one language, I'd rather use a language where some things are harder than in other languages, rather than a language where other things are simply impossible.

Todd• 19 years ago

Agreed. Not to mention that you can just write your own flavor of any language you choose (most are already written in C). Plus, you've got til the end of time, so the fact that it'll take a few years to write the first one shouldn't be a problem.

ivankirigin2• 19 years ago

Blub. Why choose a lesser evil?

ijoshua3• 19 years ago

Whatever language, I just hope it comes with decent documentation.

ivankirigin2• 19 years ago

Blub's is the best, as far as I can tell.

gibsonf1• 19 years ago

Lisp - for the sheer power and enjoyment of using it

ijoshua3• 19 years ago

If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases.

parbo2• 19 years ago

But as coffeeaddicted said above: if you give someone C/C++, he can implement a lisp interpreter easily and then have any language he pleases..

tlrobinson2• 19 years ago

Extending that argument, if you give someone any Turing-complete language, he has any other Turing-complete language...

henning• 19 years ago

Do you have to stick with a single implementation (once you choose MRI you couldn't switch to JRuby) or just the same language?

Probably Lisp or some other highly growable language.

entelarust• 19 years ago

python

sriram_sun2• 19 years ago

cpython, jython, IronPython, pypy or stackless? :)

marcus• 19 years ago

Those are implementations not languages, the language is the same language.

And when people don't mention a specific implementation they usually mean CPython.

fogus• 19 years ago

I was half tempted to pick Python, but I suppose my true answer would be C.

himanshu• 19 years ago

I am still learning many things about python but I think it would be the one language I would choose for the rest of my life.

mechanical_fish4• 19 years ago

What an inane question. That's like asking Thomas Edison which brand of telegraph key he'd like to use for the rest of his life.

jsmcgd• 19 years ago

You say inane, others say hypothetical.

mechanical_fish4• 19 years ago

Okay, maybe "inane" is too harsh. How about "ill-posed"?

pg2• 19 years ago

Bad example. People who send morse code (there are still a few) seem to care a lot about which they use. And since Edison was famous as an an extremely fast telegrapher, he'd probably be especially picky.

mechanical_fish4• 19 years ago

Oops, you've misunderstood me -- my telegraph post was, dare I say it, too telegraphic.

Yes, Edison (like all other telegraphers) must have cared a lot about telegraph key design, just as great hackers care about language design. I did not mean to imply otherwise.

What I was trying to say is that it's inconceivable that a hacker of Edison's caliber would use a single technology for his entire life, even in the (already extremely hypothetical) absence of external factors. That's because, within a handful of years, the hacker changes the tech to the point that it's no longer the same thing.

I would suggest that Edison not only cared a lot about telegraph design -- he cared so much that he took every aspect of the telegraph apart to see how it could be improved, and eventually developed the Edison telephone (http://encarta.msn.com/media_461551270_761563582_-1_1/Thomas...) along with a vast raft of other tech that was unknown in his youth.

What makes the question inane is that it assumes that "now until the end of time" is equal to or less than the lifetime of a computer language. It's not. Computer languages evolve so fast that nobody has ever stuck with one language throughout their lives. If external forces don't rewrite your language, you eventually rewrite it yourself -- you develop a bunch of libraries and restate problems in terms of them. And by "eventually" I mean "in weeks, rather than months or years" -- Steve Yegge rebuilt Rails in Javascript in less time than it took me to write this stupid post.

I suppose I could try to claim that I would be happy to be a Lisp programmer until the end of time. When someone accuses me of cheating by using Arc (which I hope to do, someday), I'll just claim that it's really Lisp. When someone needs a device driver written, I'll just claim that x86 assembly is really Lisp -- all I need to do is write the assembler in Lisp, yes? Or should I go for broke and claim that my "eternal language" is the native language of a Turing machine? It'll take me a long time to get back up to, say, Rails, but I've apparently been sentenced to spend the rest of my life at it, so why not bite off something challenging?

jimbokun• 19 years ago

Lisp.

__• 19 years ago

C++. That way, I'll look forward to my death.

innernode• 19 years ago

hahahahahaha :D made my night! thanks!

kirubakaran3• 19 years ago

What happens if I don't pick anything?

eusman3• 19 years ago

you will live a better life!

watmough3• 19 years ago

You will be forced to maintain poorly written C++ for the rest of your days.

Quote from some guy at Continental. "It wasn't a memory leak, it was a memory faucet!"

emfle• 19 years ago

The nice thing about C++ is that memory leaks are easy to fix. Valgrind is a pretty bad-ass tool.

In garbage collected languages leaks can be very hard to track down. And they do happen from time to time.

Zuider• 19 years ago

Haskell - If I was in some timeless eternity I wouldn't have to bother with monads. Otherwise if I get bored I might hack together a big bang with Lisp.

jfoutz• 19 years ago

As tempting as lisp is, I think i have to throw my hat in the Haskell ring.

Lisp lets me turn pure thought into code, as it turns out a good percentage of my thoughts are pretty crappy. Haskell fixes that.

dag• 19 years ago

Lisp, because it can consume any other language's functionality, which means that I don't have to choose.

coffeeaddicted2• 19 years ago

Yeah, but if you use c or c++ you can implement a Lispinterpreter over the weekend, so you'd have both. The other way round it's rather hard.

brent4• 19 years ago

The question isn't what compiler you would want to start off with. Its what programming language (one SINGLE programming language) would you want to use if restricted to use only it.

euccastro2• 19 years ago

The other way round it's rather hard.

The hardest part would be finding a reason to do that.

jdavid• 19 years ago

with C# compilers running on almost every platform. It can do old things like c & c++ can, and it has advanced string and memory management set up by default. c# has more control and ease of use than any other language i have played with.

If i need to consume a DLL i can do it through old ways like C methods, OLE, COM, or through new managed methods.

other languages are nice, but if i had to use just one from now and to forever, C# is the only language i see that has the ability to span the gap. Ruby, PHP, Perl, Lisp, erlang, Java, smalltalk, etc... do not seem as flexible across all of the needs to program both software and hardware.

C# can be used to program Dirext X, and OpenGL, it can be used to hack your GPU and to program your portable device. Mono runs on linux and so you can use C# in any embedded app.

aaroniba• 19 years ago

javascript: it's "like scheme with syntax", necessary anyway for cool web apps, expressive, has closures, lexical scoping, and with Rhino you can access any of the Java libraries (without writing Java code) and run it efficiently on any platform (for server-side or desktop apps). It's really the do-it-all language.

michaelneale3• 19 years ago

I think (and hope) you are right. Its not to ugly either (I guess depending on how you "grew up"). Lisp for people who can't program without braces ;)

watmough3• 19 years ago

Oliver Steele has written a great functional programming library that adds list comprehension and textural/literal lambdas to Javascript.

I keep meaning to play with that, but I always seem to have something else (like work) that I need to worry about.

Analogy alert: I kinda see functional programming as like giving up smoking. It may hurt a bit at first, but it's much better for you in the long run, providing you don't annoy everyone by continually letting them know...

chaostheory• 19 years ago

are you trying to start a religious flame war on yc news?

watmough3• 19 years ago

I don't know about Flame War, but I think it's an interesting question.

Personally, if I had to choose one language right now, I'd probably choose Javascript, simply because the syntax is easy for a PASCAL/C/C++ user, and it still manages first-class functions, much like my first real (non-BASIC) language, which was PS-Algol (think Java reflection, first class functions, easy persistence, but in 1987, not 1997!)

Once Javascript gets a mainstream in-browser JIT, it may well become even more my language of choice than it is now.

Other than Javascript, Rich Hickey's Clojure, is a pretty good candidate. I love the syntax, and being able to work directly with the JVM libs.

kirubakaran3• 19 years ago

If you had to pick one single tool to use from now until the end of time, which one would you pick?

Choices:

Hammer, Drill, Screw Driver, Saw.

brent4• 19 years ago

Poor analogy. These are, for all intensive purposes, tools for mutually exclusive tasks. Programming languages are in general for the purpose of writing programs. While they may different slightly in capabilities they are for one purpose. A "better" (IMHO) analogy along those lines would being choosing a handsaw, bandsaw, circular saw, or kitchen knife.

kirubakaran3• 19 years ago

I agree.

Even if we commit for life to the best saw there is, we are excluding all future saw-innovations.

staunch• 19 years ago

No insult intended: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=For+all+inten...

icky• 19 years ago

> for all intensive purposes,

Nitpick: "for all intents and purposes".

And, no, you don't get French benefits.

bayareaguy• 19 years ago

When C++ is your hammer, every problem looks like your thumb.

engtech• 19 years ago

ASM

because if I don't have ASM, I'm not going to get much of anything else done.

tarkin2• 19 years ago

I was going to chose this as well because eventually I'll want to interact with new (and exciting) hardware. I think that's the overriding concern.

For instance, no matter how much I love PLT-Scheme, Haskell, etc if I chose one of them there'll come a time when I want to code on a new piece hardware and won't be able to because I cannot access the underlying memory registers.

But if you have to choose which hardware specific asm then that's even harder...

boredguy8• 19 years ago

That's easy: Motorola 68000

anupamkapoor• 19 years ago

MIPS

rmason2• 19 years ago

Coldfusion. Name another language supported by three commercial vendors plus a fourth open source version (smithproject.org)? My goal is simple - rapid application development.

paulgb• 19 years ago

"Name another language supported by three commercial vendors plus a fourth open source version."

I'm sure you could say the same about C++ and Java, and probably a bunch of other languages. But that doesn't really say much about the language itself, only who uses it.

BrandonM• 19 years ago

Not to mention Lisp, which has no fewer than 8 commercial and 10 open source implementations listed here:

http://wiki.alu.org/Implementation

But you are certainly right that the number of implementations is irrelevant, as long as there is either one good open source one or 2+ commercial ones.

nreece• 19 years ago

C# (with MS .NET on Windows, ASP.NET on the web, and Mono on *nix)

michaelneale3• 19 years ago

Lisp - its not really a language to much as a meta tool to allow you to build DSLs to solve your problem.

kajecounterhack• 19 years ago

@rmason -- coldfusion?

its DEAD.

quick application development...hmm. Some other language + framework would be more like it.

I like C++ or lisp.

sriram_sun2• 19 years ago

Don't Care! I know I'm going to cheat! :)

dima• 19 years ago

Erlang.

rmason2• 19 years ago

@kajecounterhack

Maybe you should tell the four vendors that keep producing new versions that Coldfusion is dead.

As to other languages/frameworks - did I mention that it needs to scale as well?

ksamuel• 19 years ago

Since the question specifically includes libraries, I would pick the language with the best selection of useful libraries, and the largest community of users actively creating new ones. For my money, that would be Java -- even with all eternity to write my own libraries, I'd prefer have the option of not doing so, so that I can focus my time on the areas where it is important to roll my own.

Kaizyn• 19 years ago

If I could only work with one language, then I'd have to say Forth. While I don't know this one nearly as well as any of the others, this one allows you to work at the assembly instruction level up through the level of abstraction of languages like Python/Javascript. Lisp on LispMachine hardware would offer you the same sort of advantages.

The C and D languages look like they might also be fairly good choices. Everything else doesn't seem to give you the flexibility to go down to the metal while also having the ability to move up to much higher levels of abstraction.

kashif• 19 years ago

Python till I die baby!! And then some...

tuxiano• 19 years ago

python in this world, lisp in paradise

cheponis• 19 years ago

Verilog. You software weenies don't seem to understand that your fluffly abstractions need to run on real h/w. So I'd rather have control at the lowest level.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Java, because I don't have a trust fund.

One (programming) language for the rest of your life. Which one?

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