What programming languages have you used?

[lakmilis]

hmm. what about prolog.... ML ? (i was *very late* in my internet discovery and cs... so pascal won't count for me ,p)

 

shouldn't assembly be mentioned even if it probably has in disguised form?

 

PS. read the poll and maybe 1 or 3 posts down

[bascule]

what about prolog....

 

It's somewhat popular in Europe, I guess. This list is including some of the most popular languages, and Prolog isn't one of them.

 

ML ?

 

Well, OCaml is (was) on the list

 

shouldn't assembly be mentioned even if it probably has in disguised form?

 

Yeah, I asked an admin to switch OCaml to assembly

[YT2095]

I`v changed it for you, and voted in it.

[PhDP]

You know, it's funny, I was just realizing how much better C++ would be if it had a garbage collector (even if it were just there so exceptions are sane) and got rid of the C legacy, then realized I was describing Java, which isn't exactly my language du jour (although it appears to be the most popular language around these parts)

 

Why don't you like JAVA ? And what about C# ?

 

And I'm surprised Fortran is not on the list, it's very common in the scientific community (certainly more than Haskell & Erlang).

[D H]

Why don't you like JAVA ? And what about C# ?

Speaking for myself and not for bascule, Java is a toy language.

 

And I'm surprised Fortran is not on the list, it's very common in the scientific community (certainly more than Haskell & Erlang).

I believe Bascule is a computer science major. Computer scientists tend to snub their noses at Fortran.

 

Fortran has largely lost its hold on the scientific computing community to C, C++, Matlab, and other languages. It's not hard to understand why computer scientists view Fortran with disdain. The Fortran community is very slow to adopt concepts from computer science. It wasn't until Fortran 2003 that Fortran fully supported the concept of object-oriented programming, for example.

[PhDP]

Speaking for myself and not for bascule, Java is a toy language.

 

...but I'm curious to know why exactly you both don't like JAVA. It's quite popular, it does offer some improvements over C and it's getting more efficient. I don't like it either and I will probably learn C to improve the speed of my Python programs, but I wonder why so many people snub JAVA.

 

I believe Bascule is a computer science major. Computer scientists tend to snub their noses at Fortran.

 

Why ?

 

Fortran has largely lost its hold on the scientific computing community to C, C++, Matlab, and other languages.

 

I didn't know that, I thought it was still quite common. As a side note, I wonder why MatLab is so popular. It's really not that great, unless you badly need some of their packages. But the fact is; it's not cheap and Python does about the same thing... and it's free, and much faster with Pyrex ...

[Genecks]

Some other basics:

 

Shell

TCL/TK

 

Use what works.

[bascule]

Why don't you like JAVA ?

 

Java is a language I would consider fairly low on the power continuum. Java's foibles are revealed through the many design patterns one must learn in order to solve what are relatively easy problems in other languages. The factory pattern sees extensive use in Java, due in large part to the semantics of constructors in Java (all constructors are implicitly final). In higher level languages, the factory pattern is relegated to a set of cases the typical programmer never deals with. That's to say, it still has its uses, but they're not something most people ever deal with. Observers in Java require the use of ugly anonymous classes because Java previously provided no way to use functions as arguments.

 

Beyond that, Java remains just low level enough to be terribly annoying. While most languages remove size constraints on numbers (and have only Fixnums and Floats) Java retains this from lower level languages. Furthermore, Java remains halfway between the C/C++ world and the HLL world in that it lets you specify sizes for integers / floats, but not signedness. This makes Java not low level enough to perform fixed precision binary arithmetic easily (e.g. hashes, cryptographic ciphers).

 

Java is slowly working its way up the power continuum. I've heard that Java 7 features bona fide lambdas. That may help de-uglify Java observers.

 

All that said, in Java you just end up writing more code. This is largely due to its stupid type system which lacks the inference capabilities of higher level languages like OCaml or Haskell. More code generally shrouds intent as it makes things harder to find. It also makes them more difficult to maintain. The "more code" problem in Java has continued to the point that people generally manage changing interfaces by using automated tools to shove around large chunks of code, as interfaces changes can't be made simply.

[Dave]

Hmm. I'm not convinced this is a complete list, but I think it's almost there.

 

BASIC, Visual Basic, PHP, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Fortran 95 (77 is evil), bash/awk and friends, Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript.

 

C has to be my favourite language, followed very closely by Python and PHP. I agree that C++ is mostly a waste of time; however the main scientific code that I use is written in it so I dwindle on

[Adrian]

I currently use C#...and after coming from a C/C++ background, I will probably not go back unless I have to write something very low level(which I can still do in C#). I do not worry about cross-platform since I only write Windows software.

[Theresonly1]

I've used quite a few of popular languages.

First started off with True Basic then went onto Java. Been doing Java for nearly 2 full years now. I've done quite a bit C and C# plus Visual Basic but only touched them briefly. I think i quite like Java and enjoy the C, C#, Visual Basic Languages.

Cheers

[Lumpwood]

Fortran has been the bane of my life but I guess I should stick up for it a bit here...its actually commonly used in the solvers of many FEA programs including 'Abaqus' and 'Flexcom'. Its number crunching speed is yet to be surpassed...unfortunatley.

 

Regarding languages I've dabbled in Java, C++, Visual Basic,Python and all the web-based stuff...PHP etc. I mainly work with Fortran and Perl though....why...I don't know!