Favourite programming language/framework/library?

fitten · Aug 23, 2023

Current: C# and .NET are ones I prefer. Python isn't too bad but I haven't done a whole lot with it (just a couple projects where it was being used) in comparison to my C# (and other languages) experience.

I also like C and assembly. Way back in the day, I remember feeling like a "real programmer" when I was learning assembly and C. I don't do much with either one anymore other than some playing around every so often but I'll always have a warm spot for those.

Ardax · Aug 23, 2023

I love C# with LINQ and its lambda syntax. Part of it is working with it every day. Part of it is that it's a well designed language.

But there's always going to be a special place in my heart for Delphi. I enjoyed working with the language and the IDE. I liked that you also got the source code for the entire runtime library, base classes, and UI components with the IDE (except for a small number of "magic" functions implemented by the compiler). It set the benchmark for most 3rd party libraries so that they too shipped with source code. Some of that was also because even minor updates were binary-breaking changes, so it didn't lend itself to shipping precompiled units very well at all. It was hard to have questions about how something was done when you were building a program because you could always trace through the source.

You can do that in C# now too with decompilation or source packages or or what have you, but that was nice.

happyraul · Aug 24, 2023

My favorite language is Elm. It is a joy to create web apps with it. When I want to change something, or do a big refactor, the compiler is my friend. I can let my brain relax and have the compiler guide me through all the places that need changing, and when it compiles I'll know it works.

Haas Bioroid · Aug 25, 2023

happyraul said:
My favorite language is Elm. It is a joy to create web apps with it. When I want to change something, or do a big refactor, the compiler is my friend. I can let my brain relax and have the compiler guide me through all the places that need changing, and when it compiles I'll know it works.

Never used Elm, but the MVU pattern they came with is great and should be the way every GUI is programmed. It's so much more clean than any MVP, MVC, MVVM pattern.

Quarthinos · Aug 31, 2023

Is nifi allowable as a framework? It's the niche I've found myself in, and I like it here!

As for language, I'd have to go with Java, just because it's the one I've worked with most and it has so much better string handling than FORTRAN.

ShuggyCoUk · Aug 31, 2023

if c# gets discriminated unions and pattern matching I think I’d agitate to convert most of our f# to it except where full HM type inference was needed to not be so deep in nested generics angles that you’d rather just beat yourself to death with it.
fs is great but tooling support compared to c# just sucks now.

but I can’t translate f# with DU plus match to any reasonable c# without huge effort and much worse code.

gribo · Aug 31, 2023

Mine is LabVIEW, However I can't recommend it anymore, it's owner is trying to get into the ransomware business.

Aleamapper · Sep 1, 2023

ShuggyCoUk said:
if c# gets discriminated unions and pattern matching I think I’d agitate to convert most of our f# to it except where full HM type inference was needed to not be so deep in nested generics angles that you’d rather just beat yourself to death with it.
fs is great but tooling support compared to c# just sucks now.

but I can’t translate f# with DU plus match to any reasonable c# without huge effort and much worse code.

C# getting type aliases so you can give tuples and generics signatures friendly names wouldn't be as effective as a full on type system upgrade but would go a long way to making them nicer to use.

If could rename my "func of ifoo to task of result-type of ireadonlycollection of ibar" to 'SuccessCallback' that would clear things up an awful lot.

bjn · Sep 1, 2023

Aleamapper said:
C# getting type aliases so you can give tuples and generics signatures friendly names wouldn't be as effective as a full on type system upgrade but would go a long way to making them nicer to use.

If could rename my "func of ifoo to task of result-type of ireadonlycollection of ibar" to 'SuccessCallback' that would clear things up an awful lot.

Not that I'm a C# coder, but stackoverflow says you can do type aliasing. I may have misunderstood your problem though.

Defining type aliases

One feature of Pascal I found very useful was the ability to name a data type, eg type person: record name: string; age: int; end; var me: person; you: perso...

stackoverflow.com

I do like the templating type aliases in C++, I do a lot of meta programming in C++ and it helps cut down the blah.

Code:

template<class A, class B>
using VecOfPairs = std::vector<std::pair<A, B>>;

VecOfPairs<int, std::string> fred;
fred.push_back({1, "blahblah"});

Or was that the kind of thing you were asking for?

Aleamapper · Sep 1, 2023

bjn said:
Not that I'm a C# coder, but stackoverflow says you can do type aliasing. I may have misunderstood your problem though.

Defining type aliases

One feature of Pascal I found very useful was the ability to name a data type, eg type person: record name: string; age: int; end; var me: person; you: perso...

stackoverflow.com

I do like the templating type aliases in C++, I do a lot of meta programming in C++ and it helps cut down the blah.

Code:

template<class A, class B> using VecOfPairs = std::vector<std::pair<A, B>>; VecOfPairs<int, std::string> fred; fred.push_back({1, "blahblah"});

Or was that the kind of thing you were asking for?

Yeah, you can get close, but the trouble with the 'using' approach is that its scoped to a single file, and the trouble with the inheritance approach is that a lot of the types you'd want to alias, like Func<...>, are sealed, so you can't inherit from them.

Haas Bioroid · Sep 1, 2023

ShuggyCoUk said:
if c# gets discriminated unions and pattern matching I think I’d agitate to convert most of our f# to it except where full HM type inference was needed to not be so deep in nested generics angles that you’d rather just beat yourself to death with it.
fs is great but tooling support compared to c# just sucks now.

but I can’t translate f# with DU plus match to any reasonable c# without huge effort and much worse code.

C# has had pattern matching for 4 or 5 versions already, coming along with the switch expression (not to be mistaken for the good old switch statement, though it also can use pattern matching).

fitten · Sep 1, 2023

Aleamapper said:
Yeah, you can get close, but the trouble with the 'using' approach is that its scoped to a single file, and the trouble with the inheritance approach is that a lot of the types you'd want to alias, like Func<...>, are sealed, so you can't inherit from them.

I haven't tried, but can you use the global usings for type aliasing?

Aleamapper · Sep 1, 2023

fitten said:
I haven't tried, but can you use the global usings for type aliasing?

Oh cool, that works! It's still a bit nasty though, the declaration has to at the top of the class that defines it before all other usings, you can't use it outside that assembly, and it isn't namespaced, so it pollutes that assembly somewhat.

A proper way to do it would be nice!

hanser · Sep 1, 2023

Haas Bioroid said:
C# has had pattern matching for 4 or 5 versions already, coming along with the switch expression (not to be mistaken for the good old switch statement, though it also can use pattern matching).

Pattern matching and discriminated unions go together though. Without DUs, C#'s pattern matching is nice syntactic sugar that increases the semantic density of the code you can write, but it's not as expressive and powerful as ML's DUs + pattern matching.

ShuggyCoUk · Sep 2, 2023

Aleamapper said:
C# getting type aliases so you can give tuples and generics signatures friendly names wouldn't be as effective as a full on type system upgrade but would go a long way to making them nicer to use.

If could rename my "func of ifoo to task of result-type of ireadonlycollection of ibar" to 'SuccessCallback' that would clear things up an awful lot.

Is just declaring a deflagrate type for it not sufficient ?

it’s not perfect (a compatible seeming Func/Action equivalent will not seamlessly convert, but lambdas will

Aleamapper · Sep 2, 2023

ShuggyCoUk said:
Is just declaring a deflagrate type for it not sufficient ?

it’s not perfect (a compatible seeming Func/Action equivalent will not seamlessly convert, but lambdas will

Did you mean delegate type

if so yeah thats fine in some places, but not all. I just want a proper language feature for it!

ShuggyCoUk · Sep 4, 2023

Yes. Delegate type. Autocorrect fail.

Which things don’t get handled by delegates?

hunting_for_p · Sep 13, 2023

I think I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Matlab. The biggest reasons: easy to access interactive debugging, great plotting and visualization tools, and reasonably compact notation (particularly for linear algebra).

Of course, Python completely stole their lunch money and I mostly use numpy nowadays, but sometimes I'll fire up Octave to do some very early stage experiments. That said, Python has been growing steadily on me too, primarily because of its own easy to access interactive debugging. If you take away my PyCharm I'd probably go back to being a hater...

Aleamapper · Sep 13, 2023

ShuggyCoUk said:
Yes. Delegate type. Autocorrect fail.

Which things don’t get handled by delegates?

Any type signature that isn't a func/action/delegate. I get that there are numerous workarounds for individual special cases, I'd just like one, single, universal and consistent way of saying

Code:

typealias FriendlyType = (IUgly<Nasty<Stuff,Thing>, Type>, MaybeATupleToo)

(yes, I agree that often a named tuple should actually be a record/struct or whatever, thats beside the point!)

Talia Hudson · Sep 15, 2023

It's Javascript, and recently started developing an interest in solidity after reading an article.

ShuggyCoUk · Sep 18, 2023

Aleamapper said:
Any type signature that isn't a func/action/delegate. I get that there are numerous workarounds for individual special cases, I'd just like one, single, universal and consistent way of saying

Code:

typealias FriendlyType = (IUgly<Nasty<Stuff,Thing>, Type>, MaybeATupleToo)

(yes, I agree that often a named tuple should actually be a record/struct or whatever, thats beside the point!)

Ah your not just talking about functions, you’re talking about anything that’s a type.

Right. You want f# for that. Then there’s even more things you can alias away

This is a joke. Sort of.

Within a file you can do that in c#. Perhaps even with project level imports, I’ve never tried.

Ardax · Sep 19, 2023

ShuggyCoUk said:
Within a file you can do that in c#.

You can abuse global usings to do it project wide too.

Ajar · Sep 19, 2023

hunting_for_p said:
I think I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Matlab. The biggest reasons: easy to access interactive debugging, great plotting and visualization tools, and reasonably compact notation (particularly for linear algebra).

Of course, Python completely stole their lunch money and I mostly use numpy nowadays, but sometimes I'll fire up Octave to do some very early stage experiments. That said, Python has been growing steadily on me too, primarily because of its own easy to access interactive debugging. If you take away my PyCharm I'd probably go back to being a hater...

If you pine for Matlab, it's worth taking a look at Julia. Debugging is very different due to the nature of the language, but there's a decent support ecosystem that works pretty well. For expressing math concepts in code, it's hard to beat.

Donky · Mar 14, 2024

Depends on the use.

In general, C#. Can make anything from a video game to a website. Java is similar, but the IDE isn't as nice so...

C/C++ is still a common language for me, same with a dozen others. Just depends on what I'm building.

zyyn · Mar 14, 2024

I've been using Flutter for a year now and it's pretty cool. The whole immutable state thing is really neat. And the declarative style of laying out the UI is very intuitive. The tooling is great, too. Of all the IDEs I've used Android studio seems to break the least often. Some of my previous cross-platform framework experience was with Xamarin.Forms and I'm still in awe of how much better Flutter is in every possible way. We just barely managed to dodge the Maui bullet.

For a language I think I still like C# the best, or maybe Kotlin.

kenada · Mar 15, 2024

I like F#, but I don’t really get to use it much. I gave Rider a try for Advent of Code last year and thought it was nice. Maybe it’s not as good as VS, but VS on Mac is dead, and it’s nicer than Ionide and VS Code.

We use Python at work, which I would describe as definitely not a favorite.

koala · Mar 15, 2024

koala said:
My favorite programming language is bash.

Bash:

while true ; do curl --silent https://www.grover.com/es-es/search?filter=search%3Dthinkpad | htmlq '[data-testid=product-card]' | grep -v Agotado | { while read l ; do echo $(echo $l | htmlq h2 -a title) $(echo $l | htmlq p[data-testid=product-description] -t) ; done } >out ; mv out $(date -Ihour | tr -d ':-T+' )$(cat out | md5sum | sed "s/..$//") ; sleep $((60*60)) ; done

Yup, that's unmaintainable and flaky. But this will be running for about a week, and while I suppose there are better ways to do it, I got it running in a few minutes.

bjn · Mar 15, 2024

koala said:
Bash:

while true ; do curl --silent https://www.grover.com/es-es/search?filter=search%3Dthinkpad | htmlq '[data-testid=product-card]' | grep -v Agotado | { while read l ; do echo $(echo $l | htmlq h2 -a title) $(echo $l | htmlq p[data-testid=product-description] -t) ; done } >out ; mv out $(date -Ihour | tr -d ':-T+' )$(cat out | md5sum | sed "s/..$//") ; sleep $((60*60)) ; done

Yup, that's unmaintainable and flaky. But this will be running for about a week, and while I suppose there are better ways to do it, I got it running in a few minutes.

At least its not perl.

koala · Mar 15, 2024

My main thought is that I don't want to touch Perl code even with a very long pole. BUT, I have to admit there's things in it that I envy...

AdrianS · Apr 21, 2024

<Flameproof suit on>

Some of my work and some of my hobby coding is embedded programming, on old-school integer processors.

I love coding in that world in C / ASM.
I know it's inefficient in modern terms, and takes a skill-set that's rare nowadays, but after wrestling with yet another windows update, I love coding to the hardware.

There is no OS.
There is no GUI.
There is no mass storage system.
There is no virtual memory.
Or other apps running.
Or garbage collection.

There is no-one to blame but me.

Favourite programming language/framework/library?

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