Table of Contents for Programming Languages: a survey
Python is my favorite language to use for writing normal programs.
Haskell is my favorite language for inspiration of how programming languages can and will be improved; but not for actually getting stuff done.
Perl is my favorite language for one-, two-, and three-liner text manipulation from the command line.
Octave is my favorite language for quickly plotting a mathematical function (but for a serious numerical project I prefer Python).
HyperCard? is my favorite language for simple programs with a UI.
BASIC was the first language I really learned.
Logo was the first language I learned, I didn't realize it was a programming language at the time.
Here I recommend languages to learn, not necessarily to use (what's the difference? When learning languages, you really want the simplest, best expemlar of a language style. When using languages, you really want to use a popular language because it will have more libraries and more questions answered on the Web).
note: and what for concurrency? clojure? erlang?
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
1 1 C 17.246% -2.58% A 2 2 Java 16.107% -1.09% A 3 3 Objective-C 8.992% -0.49% A 4 4 C++ 8.664% -0.60% A 5 6 PHP 6.094% +0.43% A 6 5 C# 5.718% -0.81% A 7 7 (Visual) Basic 4.819% -0.30% A 8 8 Python 3.107% -0.79% A 9 23 Transact-SQL 2.621% +2.13% A 10 11 JavaScript 2.038% +0.78% A 11 18 Visual Basic .NET 1.933% +1.33% A 12 9 Perl 1.607% -0.52% A 13 10 Ruby 1.246% -0.56% A 14 14 Pascal 0.753% -0.09% A 15 17 PL/SQL 0.730% +0.10% A 16 13 Lisp 0.725% -0.22% A 17 12 Delphi/Object Pascal 0.701% -0.40% A
Programming Languages sorted by Wilson Score Interval, 2012:
Here are the HN polled programming language favorite [1] and disliked [2] scores sorted by the Wilson Score Interval [3] at 85% confidence:
Language Ups Downs 85% Confidence -------- ---- ----- -------------- Python 2881 115 0.980 Clojure 424 21 0.974 C 912 54 0.971 Haskell 488 31 0.968 Lua 140 10 0.961 Lisp 298 32 0.948 Erlang 152 18 0.941 Ruby 1607 220 0.937 C# 758 104 0.937 Scheme 177 25 0.932 OCaml 76 10 0.932 Smalltalk 62 10 0.918 Scala 222 40 0.918 Other 182 37 0.908 D 50 13 0.880 JavaScript 1310 415 0.871
http://lesswrong.com/lw/cnp/what_is_the_best_programming_language/6o8w