books-programmingLanguages-programmingLanguagesChFavLangs

Table of Contents for Programming Languages: a survey

Favorite programming languages

my favorite languages

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.

My recommended languages

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?

Links

everyone else's favorite languages

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