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).

• Python: extremely liked and extremely well-known language, beginner friendly, relatively simple. Exemplar of the imperative dynamically typed OOP language family.
• Racket (or is Clojure a better choice?): Exemplar of the LISP language family. Intro to functional style, macros, continuations.
• Haskell: Exemplar of the statically typed functional ML language family. Intro to functional style, static typing, ADTs, pattern matching, laziness, higher order types, parametric polymorphism, type classes and ad hoc polymorphism.
• C: extremely liked and extremely well-known. Introduction to pointers and manual memory management, so you know what's going on under the covers.
• Assembly (todo which one?): So you know what's going on under the covers.
• Prolog: exemplar of the logic programming language family.
• Nock: very simple. exemplar of the combinatory language family.
• C#: very well-known and more liked than disliked. Exemplar of the imperative statically typed OOP language family.
• Javascript: extremely well-known

note: and what for concurrency? clojure? erlang?

Links

• C#
  • http://www.robmiles.com/c-as-a-first-language/
• Python
  • http://www.python.org/about/gettingstarted/
  • http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/
  • http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python
  • http://www.learnpython.org/
  • http://www.pythontutor.com/
  • http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/
  • http://www.diveintopython.net/toc/index.html
• JavaScript?
  • http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript
• C#
• Racket
  • http://racket-lang.org/learning.html
  • http://lambda.jimpryor.net/learning_scheme/
  • http://htdp.org/
  • http://nostarch.com/realmofracket

everyone else's favorite languages

• TIOBE first 17 languages Oct 13:

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

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