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)
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
There are two types of programmers, those who write buggy code and those who never do anything.
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. - Bjarne Stroustrup
I think people criticise every language. I’ve generally got 5 languages that I use personally and for work: Rust, Go, Python, JS, PHP. I can complain about all 5 of them at the drop of a hat. No one likes everything about any 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.
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.
Bourne shell is orders of magnitude worse…
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.
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
'2' + 2 = '22'Modern js is pretty nice to work with but the language is very chaotic
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.
As humans we (you are human, right?) have a negativity bias. Working projects are better than perfect tech stacks. Seriously. Anything even half way working is infinitely better than anything in your head. Just pick something and go, especially for you projects.
There is a bot posting ai generated stuff on my server, but this is my normal account, to post normal human things
Oh yeah?
- [ ] I am not a robot
Solve that.
I am a fellow organic food ingesting, carbon based human, using my meat based appendices to slowly communicate with other carbon based humans on the public network. While I type this my meat based appendices are getting very tired, because I totally had to use mechanical movements to close electrical circuits in a very inneficient way to send signals to a computer
C# doesn’t have a big spotlight on it like Rust or Python, but it is a popular and very unhated language. It’s a good language that is regularly improving and has phenomenal documentation. Seriously, I’ve not gone to Stack Overflow for anything C# (outside of third-party libraries) for years; Microsoft’s documentation gives me everything I need.
As a Linux user / human, obligatory fuck Microsoft. As a .NET dev, what they’ve done with C# is really great and it’s a very pleasant language and ecosystem to work with.
It is incredible really, I worked with C# for so long, and I tend to be very critical of the stuff I’ve used for a long time. For C#, I am struggling to figure how I would improve it, because all the stuff that suck in C# is usually the lesser of two evils.
Of course if you hate classes, types, managed memory or anything invented in the last 20 years you will hate it, and I’ve met people like this. That is why you gotta keep learning as a dev, you don’t want to be one of those.
The 2 that I struggle with on a daily basis:
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missing discriminated unions. Third party libraries kind of sort of fill the gap, but it’s a pain point.
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a flawed async programming model. Namely, there are multiple models (for historical reasons / backwards compatibility), and the more current one (task-based) throws a wrench in your ability to effectively design interfaces, functions, delegates etc. that can be shared between synchronous and asynchronous code. Green threads would have fixed this, at the cost of some other potential issues, but it looks we’re stuck with tasks for now. Also, there is the awkwardness of needing to constantly use .ConfigureAwait(false) after every await, unless you shouldn’t (e.g. in the UI thread), and if you get it wrong you might cause a deadlock in your app but not in a console app… A bit confusing and easy to mess up.
F# will give you discriminated unions and do-notation (it calls it ‘computational expressions’) while retaining full access to the .net ecosystem.
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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.
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.
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++/C# whenever I’d like to develop something for an application. – 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.
I haven’t seen any negative criticism on chillicheescript here.
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.
@fbmac You search a programming language that is not criticized? Every language has its flaws.
Definitely Verilog
I never feel sure
Never feel sure about what? Whether some people criticize the stack or point out issues with the stack?
