It feels like anything is mowed down on the internet. I’ve been a dev for a long time too, and I never feel sure when I chose a stack for a new toy project (in my day job I rarely get to chose, so that’s a non issue there)
As a society and as individual computer scientists, none of us actually know what a computer is or how to use them. All programming languages are guesses, mere attempts to encode our natural-language reasoning and philosophy in the purely syntactic and formal fashion required by computers. Don’t let yourself become biased in favor of specific languages; instead, understand that all languages are bad in different ways.
There are two types of languages, those that people complain about and those that noone uses. Though rust has been voted the most loved for many years now on the stackoverflow yearly survey, and for good reason IMO.
If all you want in a programming language is that it not frequently be the target of mean-spirited critical reviews, I recommend Befunge. It’s a bit old and I don’t think anyone has updated it to be powerful enough for modern enterprise-level work, but there exists a non-zero chance that it might be suitable for one of your toy projects.
Who cares what people online are saying? Most people just like to hate on the popular thing to hate because it makes them feel like they are sitting at the cool kid’s table at lunch.
Obviously consider the limitations of what you’re using for the project you’re using it for. But do the analysis for yourself. Don’t avoid something just because people don’t like it.
For example Javascript gets a lot of flak online but it’s one of the most popular languages and in my opinion, it’s great for what it does. I prefer coding in JS over Python even if JS has those idiosyncrasies that makes it the subject of many memes online.
There is a good quote from Bjarne Stroustrup for that “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”.
I think for hobby projects it’s the best to use languages that interest you
This for sure. At work (fe dev), I need to get things done quickly and reliably, so I use Svelte. At home, I’m just playing around, so I’ll try things that are out of my wheelhouse or strange, eg rn I’m rebuilding the site I always rebuild in Qwik, Go, and Surrealdb - why? Because they seem neat. (Though I might just rm rf that to build something on Bun, because is there anything is can’t do?)
I feel like nobody ever bad mouths forth. Arguably it’s just because it’s super niche, but there’s lots of niche languages that people shit on all the time. I guess if you’re the kind of person to bother trying out a forth you’re probably going to think it’s neat.
Props for actually answering the question, and with a reasonable language too. Although Forth hasn’t clicked for me personally, and I doubt it’s a better choice for OP, it’s still a unique language design and worth studying.
Yeah. I think Forth is kind of just interesting for what it is and it fits it’s niche well. If you’re looking into Forth you probably appreciate it for what it is, and it’s a super flexible language so it can kind of be what you want it to be. It’s obviously not perfect, and it’s not the ideal fit for what most people want to do… but I guess people just don’t really expect it to be more than it is and it’s a smaller community so nobody is too vocal or angry about it. People will complain about other niche languages like lisp, ocaml, prolog, or Haskell all the time, but people don’t say much about Forth, and when somebody does talk about it it’s pretty much all praise. The Forth people are just content I guess!
If you met or worked with the people who post the majority of the programming-language-ism posts, you would know deep down in your bones how little you need to be listening to them.
Python is for some reason darling of many, sometimes it has almost religious connotations. Meanwhile differences from e.g. PHP are mostly superficial and each has their strengths and weaknesses.
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse clusterf*ck than JavaScript, yet it’s rarely criticized.
Rust rarely gets criticized which isn’t necessarily a problem, since it’s IMHO a good language for its intended use case. But people tend to recommend it for things where the trade offs come out negative. (apps not needing max. performance)
In general I wouldn’t follow the trends on social media, it’s all a huge groupthink, mostly focusing on (easily avoidable) warts, and ignoring strengths.
I use both ALOT professionally.
I can say I prefer Python over PowerShell anyway… Except for Windows automation, where PS is actually pretty dope.
Bash is okay, I’ve seen folks write shit in it that should have been done in Python, or GoLang, or literally anything else.
That being said, I won’t go near Rust, not because it’s a bad language feature wise, but my brain hurts when I try and read Rust code.
That’s because PowerShell blurs the line between programming language and scripting language. By accessing the entire .NET library, of course it’s going to have more features than a basic scripting language that relies on open source utilities installed on the system.
The reasons people hate it are because they hate Microsoft, it breaks from traditional shells too far, and it’s a pain in the ass to type (verbose). To use PowerShell effectively, you almost need to write full software programs. At that point, just use C#.
As for you preferring it to Python… I think you don’t know Python. I’m trying to come up with every way possible to make PowerShell sound better than Python, and I got nothing. Maybe you don’t like whitespace? I cannot understand your point of view here. Help me out
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse clusterf*ck than JavaScript, yet it’s rarely criticized.
Both have their place. Bourne shell scripts are great as a container for connecting the various tools you have around - and for that kind of relatively simple script is way easier to use than something like Powershell. If you use it for something more complex you’re probably an idiot.
Same with Javascript - if you need to annoy someone with popups on a website, or have something dance around in the window it’s a great language. If you use it for something else you’re probably also an idiot.
I never feel sure what I want to use, and I get tempted to stop what I’m doing to do something in another stack, because I am most interested in the tech than my own toy project
A lot of the criticisms at specific languages are really directed at people. Especially those that have “{language} brain”. These people are of the opinion that everything looks solvable by said language even if it isn’t the best tool for the job.
If you pick the best tool for the job, no one has standing to rightly criticize you. What’s the right tool? One that you know (or have the ability to learn) and has proven itself in its ability to solve problems you’re seeking to solve.
Every languages has their own pitfalls. The answer on picking a language is to pick whatever works for you. There may be even domain-specific languages if you’re interested in a domain, and it can be way more flexible than general-purpose solutions for that domain too.
I use 4 languages.
C++ for adding features to a program.
C# for making .dll for an application (Paint.NET). Kinda similar purpose to what I do with G’MIC, except so much more limited.
Python for processing strings
G’MIC for creating/editing raster graphics images (volumetric too)
Now, I wish there was a vector equivalent to G’MIC, but there isn’t.
Honestly, I would advise to not pick a language based on popularity, hate, or whichever of those qualify as internet fame these days.
I would approach the question with what you want to get out of your toy project. Do you want to get something done? Then pick a language that is close to what you are already familiar with. Do you mainly want to learn something? Go with a language with concepts you are unfamiliar with, eg. pick a functional language if you mostly do OOP stuff or pick a low level language when you mostly do high level web stuff.
My advice, generally speaking, is: When you do something in your spare time, don’t spend it on things you already do at work. The way to improve in software development is to see problems from many different angles and to rethink the solutions you already know.
Whenever I tested something that sounds great yet it is slow to get adoption I end learning a reason why it it’s not growing. It’s good to learn what the reason is before you spend a lot of time on it
No amount of reading will replace experience.
At some point you will come to the place where you’ll be the one who know why something that sounds good won’t be and why it won’t get adopted, but if you only base your decision on the opinions of others, you’ll never really learn anything.
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As a society and as individual computer scientists, none of us actually know what a computer is or how to use them. All programming languages are guesses, mere attempts to encode our natural-language reasoning and philosophy in the purely syntactic and formal fashion required by computers. Don’t let yourself become biased in favor of specific languages; instead, understand that all languages are bad in different ways.
And don’t forget, that much of what people criticize isn’t the language per se, but the community/ecosystem around it.
NPM is objectively bad, but Javascript is by no means coupled to it.
Java projects are often very “verbose”, but that’s a choice by the developer of the libraries and apps, not so much Java itself.
Ecosystems matter, though. In fact, I think they’re the hardest part to learn for most languages.
You can try to get away from NPM, but you’ll always run across instructions on how to do a thing in NPM. Do it any other way, and you’re on your own.
You can try to write Java in a less verbose way, but the standard library will fight you before we even talk about third party libs.
I never argued, that they don’t matter.
There are two types of languages, those that people complain about and those that noone uses. Though rust has been voted the most loved for many years now on the stackoverflow yearly survey, and for good reason IMO.
If all you want in a programming language is that it not frequently be the target of mean-spirited critical reviews, I recommend Befunge. It’s a bit old and I don’t think anyone has updated it to be powerful enough for modern enterprise-level work, but there exists a non-zero chance that it might be suitable for one of your toy projects.
I would also recommend one of its successors, Seed. It’s like the TypeScript of Befunge.
Who cares what people online are saying? Most people just like to hate on the popular thing to hate because it makes them feel like they are sitting at the cool kid’s table at lunch.
Obviously consider the limitations of what you’re using for the project you’re using it for. But do the analysis for yourself. Don’t avoid something just because people don’t like it.
For example Javascript gets a lot of flak online but it’s one of the most popular languages and in my opinion, it’s great for what it does. I prefer coding in JS over Python even if JS has those idiosyncrasies that makes it the subject of many memes online.
Ie
Modern js is pretty nice to work with but the language is very chaotic
There is a good quote from Bjarne Stroustrup for that “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”. I think for hobby projects it’s the best to use languages that interest you
This for sure. At work (fe dev), I need to get things done quickly and reliably, so I use Svelte. At home, I’m just playing around, so I’ll try things that are out of my wheelhouse or strange, eg rn I’m rebuilding the site I always rebuild in Qwik, Go, and Surrealdb - why? Because they seem neat. (Though I might just rm rf that to build something on Bun, because is there anything is can’t do?)
There are two types of programmers, those who write buggy code and those who never do anything.
I feel like nobody ever bad mouths forth. Arguably it’s just because it’s super niche, but there’s lots of niche languages that people shit on all the time. I guess if you’re the kind of person to bother trying out a forth you’re probably going to think it’s neat.
Props for actually answering the question, and with a reasonable language too. Although Forth hasn’t clicked for me personally, and I doubt it’s a better choice for OP, it’s still a unique language design and worth studying.
Yeah. I think Forth is kind of just interesting for what it is and it fits it’s niche well. If you’re looking into Forth you probably appreciate it for what it is, and it’s a super flexible language so it can kind of be what you want it to be. It’s obviously not perfect, and it’s not the ideal fit for what most people want to do… but I guess people just don’t really expect it to be more than it is and it’s a smaller community so nobody is too vocal or angry about it. People will complain about other niche languages like lisp, ocaml, prolog, or Haskell all the time, but people don’t say much about Forth, and when somebody does talk about it it’s pretty much all praise. The Forth people are just content I guess!
If you met or worked with the people who post the majority of the programming-language-ism posts, you would know deep down in your bones how little you need to be listening to them.
Haven’t heard a bad thing here about COBOL (yet).
Must be the best and most fun programming language!
Python is for some reason darling of many, sometimes it has almost religious connotations. Meanwhile differences from e.g. PHP are mostly superficial and each has their strengths and weaknesses.
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse clusterf*ck than JavaScript, yet it’s rarely criticized.
Rust rarely gets criticized which isn’t necessarily a problem, since it’s IMHO a good language for its intended use case. But people tend to recommend it for things where the trade offs come out negative. (apps not needing max. performance)
In general I wouldn’t follow the trends on social media, it’s all a huge groupthink, mostly focusing on (easily avoidable) warts, and ignoring strengths.
PowerShell is to bash what a fighter jet is to a model airplane, but you don’t dare mention it or you’ll get chewed out.
I prefer it to python too, I must be the antichrist.
I use both ALOT professionally. I can say I prefer Python over PowerShell anyway… Except for Windows automation, where PS is actually pretty dope. Bash is okay, I’ve seen folks write shit in it that should have been done in Python, or GoLang, or literally anything else.
That being said, I won’t go near Rust, not because it’s a bad language feature wise, but my brain hurts when I try and read Rust code.
That’s because PowerShell blurs the line between programming language and scripting language. By accessing the entire .NET library, of course it’s going to have more features than a basic scripting language that relies on open source utilities installed on the system.
The reasons people hate it are because they hate Microsoft, it breaks from traditional shells too far, and it’s a pain in the ass to type (verbose). To use PowerShell effectively, you almost need to write full software programs. At that point, just use C#.
As for you preferring it to Python… I think you don’t know Python. I’m trying to come up with every way possible to make PowerShell sound better than Python, and I got nothing. Maybe you don’t like whitespace? I cannot understand your point of view here. Help me out
Both have their place. Bourne shell scripts are great as a container for connecting the various tools you have around - and for that kind of relatively simple script is way easier to use than something like Powershell. If you use it for something more complex you’re probably an idiot.
Same with Javascript - if you need to annoy someone with popups on a website, or have something dance around in the window it’s a great language. If you use it for something else you’re probably also an idiot.
Never feel sure about what? Whether some people criticize the stack or point out issues with the stack?
I never feel sure what I want to use, and I get tempted to stop what I’m doing to do something in another stack, because I am most interested in the tech than my own toy project
@fbmac You search a programming language that is not criticized? Every language has its flaws.
A lot of the criticisms at specific languages are really directed at people. Especially those that have “{language} brain”. These people are of the opinion that everything looks solvable by said language even if it isn’t the best tool for the job.
If you pick the best tool for the job, no one has standing to rightly criticize you. What’s the right tool? One that you know (or have the ability to learn) and has proven itself in its ability to solve problems you’re seeking to solve.
Every languages has their own pitfalls. The answer on picking a language is to pick whatever works for you. There may be even domain-specific languages if you’re interested in a domain, and it can be way more flexible than general-purpose solutions for that domain too.
I use 4 languages.
Paint.NET). Kinda similar purpose to what I do with G’MIC, except so much more limited.Now, I wish there was a vector equivalent to G’MIC, but there isn’t.
Honestly, I would advise to not pick a language based on popularity, hate, or whichever of those qualify as internet fame these days.
I would approach the question with what you want to get out of your toy project. Do you want to get something done? Then pick a language that is close to what you are already familiar with. Do you mainly want to learn something? Go with a language with concepts you are unfamiliar with, eg. pick a functional language if you mostly do OOP stuff or pick a low level language when you mostly do high level web stuff.
My advice, generally speaking, is: When you do something in your spare time, don’t spend it on things you already do at work. The way to improve in software development is to see problems from many different angles and to rethink the solutions you already know.
Whenever I tested something that sounds great yet it is slow to get adoption I end learning a reason why it it’s not growing. It’s good to learn what the reason is before you spend a lot of time on it
No amount of reading will replace experience. At some point you will come to the place where you’ll be the one who know why something that sounds good won’t be and why it won’t get adopted, but if you only base your decision on the opinions of others, you’ll never really learn anything.
Qt & C++ because KDE doesn’t allow feedback.
you got me laughing here
KDE does not develop Qt and is not c++ comitte
Yeah, wasn’t suggesting they were. KDE uses them. Since they’re not willing to take user feedback, thought I’d mention it here.