jasoncwarner
commented
4 years ago I have a few "favorites" so let me explain.
I think conceptually, the one I've always liked the best is Clojure from a theoretical standpoint. It's a lisp, running on the JVM. Love it. That said, the practicality of it is not high so I consider it my favorite theoretical language.
I like aspects of languages too. Like Eiffel has pre/post conditions (programming by contract) and that is an amazingly powerful approach to writing great code. Love the concept. Never would use Eiffel itself but love that concept.
And then there's Erlang. I love it. It's similar to Clojure though in that the practicality is not high, but if you can find a team of 5-10 people who know Erlang, you can build some of the highest scale, most resilient systems the world has ever seen. It was designed for this and it's amazing. In fact, nothing even comes close to it for the entire bag of tricks with OTP.
But if I was starting a project from scratch with for a company that I wanted to build (think generic SaaS startup etc etc), I'd pick Python or Ruby and be done with it. I like both of those languages and ecosystems well enough and you can find people that love those and live in those. I really like both for different reasons though Ruby feels closer to my brain b/c of my Perl roots.
BTW: I grew up on C, Perl, Java and I have to say, there is something weird about going back to Perl and seeing some old code I wrote...something rather comforting about it.
I have heard that you don't code that much anymore, but I think for most programmers there's one language that has a special place in our hearts because it unleashed our creativity, and helped us really feel the awesome potential power of programming. What is yours?