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Old 24th May 2008
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
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This is a really hard poll for me (no vote yet) because I'm very much a linguistically diverse person at heart.

I began learning about programming through a tutorial on C++ about November 2005 and have always been largely self-educating with it like everything else I do in computers... I pick up languages pretty easy and like learning them, especially ones that take different approaches to problems.


As far as language design goes, I would say my favorite is probably Java. It's a nice language, most things in Java I've seen just 'make sense', and comes with a large collection of classes -> the only problem I have is the design is so OOP focused.

I especially love Javas interfaces, although I'm indifferent to whether a language uses single/multi-inheritance but I like the concept of interfaces.

Although I must admit, I generally do my best to _avoid_ writing any Java code!!!


If I had to pick a single favorite, I probably would pick either C or Perl.


C is to me, a perfect language without flaws. It is small, you can fit the entire language into your head w/o problems and use a reference to look for functions you use rarely. The only problem is the best parts of what make C so perfect also mean I tend to be more productive the less I use it :|


Perl I might pick, because it is the closest to natural language and I often can use it to do a lot of stuff. While still having a lot of familiar and logically thought up syntax. Not to mention for various tasks I often find it most effective to write a perl script to deal with it, define and refine a command line interface to the problem, and quickly document the entire thing in POD. Perl is like a best friend in my toolbox, not sure if I'd want to work with 10 thousands of lines of it but it's a great language for working on my machines.




When it comes to actually writing code, I usually use whatever I am using the most of at the moment, what I feel like (the oh let's just do XYZ in Foo for the sake of doing it in Foo), or the language I have to (e.g. working a websites CMS or a given library)



A lot of times I try to use the simplest solution first, if I can do it in Bourne I usually will -> the utilities provided on a unix box are to good to write my own!

If I need more then that can do, I'll often apply Perl, Python, or Ruby -> which ever I'm using most of at the time or feel most like using^^


PHP is also a great scripting language and recently has transitioned from most hated to debug to very handy since I learned it had an interactive mode . Because my introduction to the language was having to edit someone else's sludge without even learning the language first lol. Since then I've had to grab the manual and start writing a library for a website that has lacked anyone with a brain behind the code.

I could swear... My predecessor is the first "know nothing" in terms of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/SQL we've had as a webmaster but most of the code was written by his predecessors (now a graduate of Cambridge) predecessor (who became a MCSE). And I'm probably the first moron on the website to ever hear of doing things "properly" instead of the half rear-ended way!


GUI related projects usually end up in Python with Qt because I don't like C++ for a lot of stuff I'd rather do in C or Perl/Python/Ruby. Most command line driven projects I do end up in Perl or C.


I guess you could say, I don't have a favorite language exactly :|
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