Favorite programming language, other than Perl:

[Petruchio]

APL

 5/1%

ASP

 7/1%

Assembler

 20/2%

BASIC

 10/1%

C

 148/16%

C#

 15/2%

C++

 113/12%

COBOL

 5/1%

Forth

 4/0%

FORTRAN

 10/1%

Haskell

 5/1%

Java

 109/12%

JavaScript

 22/2%

Lisp

 22/2%

Pascal

 13/1%

PHP

 66/7%

PL/I

 1/0%

Python

 27/3%

Ruby

 32/3%

Scheme

 17/2%

Smalltalk

 7/1%

Tcl

 2/0%

Visual Basic

 24/3%

Other than Perl? Bah!

 175/19%

Whatever kudra says I should like

 18/2%

Other

 39/4%

916 total votes

[cjf]

Unfortunately I haven't tried them all... yet :) but my current favorite (other than Perl of course) is Ruby. Beautiful OO, and very easy to learn coming from a Perl background. While there's no Ruby Monks yet, there is a Ruby Garden and some good mailing lists.

For the interested, there's also an excellent book available online that will give you a good feel for the language.

[VSarkiss]

Hey, Ruby Garden is in PHP. I prefer web sites where people eat their own cooking. ;-)

[cjf]

They'll be able to run a Ruby-based system similar to the Everything Engine once the admin of this project gets off his lazy ass and releases some code ;).

[educated_foo]

I've glanced at Ruby before, probably after someone remarked on how clean it is. I just took another look this afternoon, and was once again found myself ready to abandon the attempt without doing anything useful, for the usual reasons:
• Lack of documentation: If I write a method that takes a block, how do I then pass that block on to another method? The introductory guides give examples, but no general rules for how blocks work. After a bit of searching, I found the Pragmatic Programmers' guide which, although good, appears to be at least a year out of date. And I still haven't found the answer, though I'm not done searching. Then again, maybe I'm just slow or something.
• Hackishness: The syntax is usually clean, friendly, DWIM, and the like. But when you look at some of the corner cases, it gets frightening. Take a look at this from the doc:

  When Ruby sees a name such as ``a'' in an expression, it needs to determine if it is a local variable reference or a call to a method with no parameters. To decide which is the case, Ruby uses a heuristic. As Ruby reads a source file, it keeps track of symbols that have been assigned to. It assumes that these symbols are variables. When it subsequently comes across a symbol that might be either a variable or a method call, it checks to see if it has seen a prior assignment to that symbol. If so, it treats the symbol as a variable; otherwise it treats it as a method call.

  So if I add a local variable "foo", it can silently mask subsequent calls to a function "foo" that I've been happily calling for a month? Yikes. Sure, Perl has some wierd things going on in places, but they mostly just show up in golf games.
Don't get me wrong -- it's a fun, interesting language; if you squint a bit, it's clean at a higher level. But it still seems like a hack, not a solid foundation for software. I wouldn't trust it with my file system.

/s

[elusion]

I am one monk who feels strongly about Ruby -- strongly in favor. My main project right now (I'm a teenager -- no job) is in Ruby, so I've gotten to know if fairly well.

As to the lack of documentation. It's true that there's not a lot, but what's out there is good stuff. And the Pragmatic Programmer's guide may be a year old, but it most certainly is not a year out of date. After all, languages don't change that much.

It is possible to receive a block and then pass it on, it's just not introductory guide material. :-) Here's an example

class Foo
     def initialize #no initialization needed for this class
     end

     def bar(&block)
         self.baz(&block)
     end

     def baz
          yield(3)
     end
end

foo = Foo.new
foo.bar { |n| puts n } # prints "3\n"

When you talk about adding a local variable that masks calls to an earlier added function of the same name, you forget something: Ruby is an object-oriented langauge. You're supposed to call functions on objects, which can't be confused with a variable. In a class definition, you call one of that class's methods like self.method or like method, which is merely a shortcut for the former. It calls that method with that instance from the class.

This was also discussed at Ruby: An Abbot breaks silencewind. If you haven't checked it out, check it out. It's not better or worse than Perl -- it's different, and I love them both.

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com

[FoxtrotUniform]

Argh! Stupid radio buttons!

I went with C, mostly because it's wonderfully low-level and lets you do some pretty amazing things with memory management. (Lest I start a flamewar, I'll also point out that it lets you do some excruciatingly harmful things with memory mangement.) And because I'm a graphics geek, and C is the best language out there for putting lots of polygons onto the screen really fast.

But I also like C++, because it's mostly like C and has a wickedly featureful OO model. (I actually write most of my graphics code in C++, because of the OO model.)

And I like Haskell, because it's an excellent clean functional language, and it taught me just how cool curried functions and first-class-object functions can be.

And I like LISP, because it's ridiculously tight on the syntax and has pretty much every feature you could ever want. It's like programming with nothing but NANDs, but fun.

And, truth be told, I like 68000 assembly language, mostly because I learned x86 asm first and the 68k just seemed so damn elegant in comparison.

So those are my favourite programming languages, other than Perl. But I only got to choose one. Dammit.

--
:wq

[chicks]

Argh! Stupid radio buttons!

My thoughts exactly. What about a pre-poll poll to determine which languages should make into the final poll? sed and PostScript really should have made the list.

But I'm really surprised awk didn't make it in there. It disturbs me a bit that I was stuck voting for C++. I know I'm not the only person who got sucked into perl after pushing awk beyond the limits of what it was originally intended to do. sigh

[grinder]

Yep. I voted for "other" simply because awk wasn't there. I used awk on unix and DOS (yay Thomson Toolkit), and found myself writing awk scripts that wrote their own batch files and then called those batch files to continue the processing. Ah, the good old days. It was indeed outgrowing awk's limits that led me to Perl.

These days I still find myself using awk for one-liners, because it's more compact for saying things like '{print $4}' that the corresponding Perl code.

Awk really was a godsend after having dealt with only grep and sed. I no longer remember any sed, and that's a Good Thing.


print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'

[andye]

Argh! Stupid radio buttons! ... So those are my favourite programming languages, other than Perl. But I only got to choose one. Dammit.

Hmmm.... seems to me that the solution lies in instant runoff voting, as neatly explained here, by the muppets.

I'll just go and post a Discussion about it...

Andy.

PS: Joke

[bluto]

I'm dating myself, but I cut my pattern matching teeth on the likes of Snobol and Icon. I can only think their omission reflects on the pollster's lack of experience. :-)

They contain a lot of features that Larry no doubt considered when designing Perl (since he's been around for a while). Ralph Griswold, a old-time language design guru and advisor of mine at the U of Ariz, wrote both of them, so I guess I'm pretty biased.

Snobol had the novel idea of success or failure of each line of code and allowed you to put optional goto's at the end of each line of code (shudder). You could compile code on the fly (ala eval).

Icon allowed you to get into the guts of the pattern matching behavior, allowing you to use generators (kind of like closures) and explicitly controlling backtracking. Actually it's pattern matching was too low level for me and Perl's re matching is much easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis. At a later time, they instrumented the interpreter and you could write hooks that allowed you to graphically see how algorithms executed in it. You could do things similar to the way that ActiveState's Komodo allows you to view an re as it matches text, but much more as well.

Both of these had dynamic data types and automatic garbage collection to make the programmer's life easier.

Ok back to reality - Perl has fixed a lot of the warts that they had though ...

bluto

[thelenm]

What? Ada's not on the list? Not that I would have voted for it. :-) I had a professor in college who used to work for the Department of Defense and loved to talk about Ada, every chance he got. The students also loved to talk about Ada, mostly as the punchline to jokes about the professor.

[Blop]

O'Caml is missing. One camel is not enough for me.

Blop

[Putzfrau]

Other than Perl C++ would have to be it,lets not even mention COBOL. Although JCL is a batch language it would of been amusing to see it in the list

"Your baudrate depends on the size of your pipe". -ALex Simonelis

[Poetic Justice]

Gotta go with C . If for no other reason than how minimalistic and elegant it looks when properly formatted.
It has an ANSI standard backing it, and it's evolution is being managed by a polyglot committee and not by a single company.
Cheers,
Poetic Justice

[erikharrison]

What? No one votes for Python?

Look, I love Ruby and all (I reallyreallyreally do) but where would Ruby have been without Python to be it's father (Perl being is mother, and Smalltalk being the milkman).

Of course, even Python doesn't compare to befunge . . .

Cheers,
Erik

[ignatz]

What??? No intercal?!

()-()
 \"/
  `                                                     

[BUU]

Drat, you beat me to it =P
definately ditto.
Or maybe befunge..

[Chainsaw]

Mmmm... Let me Think, In addition to the Great Perl I would say that C++, is my other favorite language.

Although I work in Visual BASIC, Perl and C++ are my favorites and try to enjoy them as posible as I can.



---

God help me always to see the other face of the coin. And prevent me from accusing of betrayal those who don't think just as I do.

[Anonymous Monk]

You should try Java. It is very well designed and garbage collection takes away all that 'having to walk down the driveway' stuff. No but really it scales very well too. The only problem with Java is, is that it is not Perl. With Java you have to think(just hacking causes mental stress with the java compiler) whereas with perl you just slip on your favourite hacking shoes and away you go. I see VB scattered here and there, has the world gone mad!! VB is /(s?hMit)*/ and the syntax is crap(what's wrong with ending statements with a ';'? Also the fact that VB keeps you on a windows computer is a travesty. Once I have finished my next VB project I am kicking MS out(it hasn't paid its rent). So java says goodbye(am I sinning in the Monestry with this): public class Goodbye { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Goodbye"); } } // Fu^k print "Goodbye"; Now thats better.

[grep]

LOGO

Gotta love the turtle.



grep

Unix - where you can throw the manual on the keyboard and get a command

[mdillon]

Just for kicks, here's another Logo implementation, this one written in C: Berkeley Logo.

And, just for a few more kicks and to show that Logo isn't just for graphics, here is Brian Harvey's sample program from the linked page (it generates combinations from a list of lists):

to choices :menu [:sofar []]
if emptyp :menu [print :sofar stop]
foreach first :menu [(choices butfirst :menu sentence :sofar ?)]
end

[Dr.Altaica]

Speaking of LOGO Turtles I have one of the old Terrapin(TM) Turtle robot but haven't found only information about how ot get it working. Anyone know how to control them? No Terrapin::Turtle module in cpan

|\_/|
/o o\
(>_<)
 `-'

[mr_mischief]

I'm surprised that in a Perl community there's not more write-in votes for some of the older 'scripting' and 'batch' languages like JCL, Rexx, ABC, or the like. I was torn between the available C and writing in Rexx, so I went with C. I very nearly chose 'other', though.

It seems that Perl has pretty much killed Rexx through attrition/starvation since they fill the same niche. That's a definite strong sign that Perl has a lot of things right that were wrong in other languages. Rexx was a good language to do what I needed it to do before I found Perl, though. It was much nicer to write small programs than Pascal, and it was much more powerful than most forms of BASIC.

Christopher E. Stith
Do not try to debug the program, for that is impossible. Instead, try only to relaize the truth. There is no bug. Then you will find that it is not the program that bends, but only the list of features.

[yung_tw]

I'll go with good old C. Still gotta try ruby for OO's tho.. anyhow.. I didn't know javascript was a "programming" language.. always thought it was a "scripting" language ;) peace.

[Chmrr]

I prefer to have physical evidence of my programming; that's why I program in Chef!

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'

[jlongino]

I thought hard about this one, but in the end I had to go with PL/I (the only one at the time of this post). I achieved a decent proficiency very quickly with PL/I and because of it I went through a succession of University jobs that ended up with the one I currently have.

I've used many of the other languages listed, but don't really care for any of them (Assembler, Basic, Fortran, Pascal, JavaScript, Visual Basic).

As mr_mischief mentioned I was also fond of Rexx--which I also used for glue purposes but once we switched from an IBM mainframe to Solaris boxen, both PL/I and Rexx fell by the wayside. It was a couple of years before I found out about Perl so we made due with fortran, shell scripts and SAS. HEY! What about SAS? True it started out as a statistical analysis application, but the ease with which you can sort and merge data sets is remarkable (plus the data manipulation tools aren't too bad).

--Jim

[mAsterdam]

Other: ProLog
ProLog is the one big language Perl did not (as far as I can see) borrow from, except for the customary extension .pl , which suggests that Larry Wall was not completely aware of the existence of ProLog at that time.
Some do not even consider ProLog a programming language. True: The prolog engine favours depth-first backtracking solutions and if your problem does not fit the prolog set of solutions that behaviour can get terribly in the way. But...
There are lots of partial problems where the prolog engine presents a very good fit. I like the elegant syntax, the expressive power and especially the way of thinking that comes with using it.
I have really tried to imagine ways I could combine Perl and Prolog, into some hybrid interpreter combining the niceties of both languages but I could not come up with feasible proposal, or even a readable piece of code that would demonstrate the huge power of that combination. Yet I am convinced that even Perl could gain expressive elegance and power by borrowing from Prolog. How? I don't know. Yet - I hope.

[Joost]

Hmmm...
Had to go for C++, reasoning something like:

C=64 basic - ugly as hell, but my first language
C=64 Assembler - so incredibly fast in comparison with C=64 basic
680x0 Assembler - the most readable assembly i know
Pascal - thank god I only had to use it one for 1 trimester
Prolog - Apart from the fact that it's so useless, i really like recursion with backtracking
Perl - the best example of a computer-language designed for comunication between humans.
C - Like assembly, but less readable ;-)
C++ - C, but with OO and (I think) nicer syntax.


-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.

[silent11]

I met a guy in high school ('94) that did QBASIC. I was really intrigued with the whole 'programming' thing at first. I dabbled in it for a month or two and gave up programming completely for basketball and girls. 6 years later a co-worker introduced me to perl and I fell in love with it! I've been programming in perl ever since. I could always follow VB, but I just didn't like it. So I'd have to say that second to perl is BASIC.

-Silent11

[clintp]

Fortunately for you BASIC has risen from the dead. It's now been ported to the Parrot runtime engine. And for you naysayers who think BASIC is all washed up, it's even more advanced than Perl 6!

Feature	BASIC	Perl 6
Easy to learn syntax	Yes!	Still Unknown
Large base of existing software	Yes!	Still Unknown
Speed	Faster than Perl 6!	Stationary
Runtime	Parrot	Still unimplemented

And much, much more.

:)

[Putzfrau]

Can anyone here say Gorrilla Basic?, ok then nibbles? :>

"Your baudrate depends on the size of your pipe". -ALex Simonelis

[Molt]

I had to hit the C++ button. Other languages may be a tad quicker (Assembler, C), easier to use (Java), or more Perl-like (Ruby, Python) but I find C++ and Perl to just work well together in the toolkit.

Perl's great for most things, and I only look away from it when I need raw speed. This pretty much rules out most of the languages listed. I used to reach for C in my youth, but now reach for the C++ and feel slightly happier with the OO and so forth..

When things need waking I reach for the printed perlguts and XS references and try and recall the stuff I taught myself last time I needed waking. It's slowly settling round my brain now though.

[tretin]

Since a friend is holding a gun to my head, I had to vote PHP. I am truly sorry... this is not the way I feel... I mean I love PHP! (call for help!)

work it harder make it better do it faster makes us stronger more than ever hour after our work is never over.

[TStanley]

I originally started programming in Pascal, which I learned in a college course, but then I stopped taking classes for a while. In 2000, I started working for a company where I started using perl, PHP, and C/C++. I found that while I can understand the flow of a C/C++ program, I couldn't write a program in it. I found that PHP was fairly simple to understand, and didn't have any problems with it. And saving the best for last, perl is easy to understand (unless you are trying to figure out one of Erudil's obfu's) and is just a fun language to play with.

TStanley
--------
"Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose you were a
member of Congress... But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain

[brianarn]

I had to pick C, because of my fun MUD-coding experiences. Sure, it's not very OOP, and it's got a polluted namespace like you wouldn't believe, and uses linked lists from hell, but it's so much fun to play in MUD code, especially when a 'feature' nukes some player you didn't like by accident. ;)

However, I did almost pick BASIC. On my first personal computer, this ancient Epson (8086, 2 5.25" drives, no HD), I had GWBASIC. GWBASIC was interesting - it didn't have some things that QBASIC does that I liked, and so couldn't take some of the games I found for QBASIC over to GWBASIC, but I found a neat feature that it had.

GWBASIC had a command called play. It took a string which consisted of note names, I could put a dot after the letter to represent the musical dot notation, I could use a > to go up an octave (and < to go down an octave) etc - it was a blast.

Before I found play, I'd written generic little games here and there, like hangman, but with play, I added music to my games.

I even wrote my own screen saver (like I really needed one). I used my first song, Mary Had A Little Lamb (arguably the "Hello World!" of the music world), and also set it to take the simple lyrics and scroll them across my screen randomly, creating a snow-like effect of words set to music.

I still have all of my GWBASIC code sitting on some 5.25" disks in my mother's storage shed - I should go get those, find an old drive, and check it out again. hehe.

~Brian

[Anonymous Monk]

I liked Qbasic over GWBasic when it came out, eventually BasicPDS was the cream of the crop because it compiled exe's the size of C compiled code. Compared to C, C was only a tad faster with string manips. The core compiler for BasicPDS was C based. I still remember writing ISAM apps, better than the other DB's at the time. Then came VB, hated VB for DOS, but VB was ok.

I still think back to the days of my C64 and C128, using Basic 2.0 and Basic 7.0, although 7.0 was very much like Simon's BASIC which was really good. I miss the monitor tool to look at live memory, and see how the code looks in memory. :) Man, ever wonder how many hundreds or thousands of programs and scripts you ever wrote over the years.

I've been working with Perl for about 2 years, and it's become my new love. :P I do ALMOST everything in Perl! The syntax in Perl is also helping me learn C.

I gave up on VB when 6.0 came out - I was so disgusted I deleted from the drive, and started learning Perl,SQL, and C/C++.

I'm still trying to understand the niche for pointers in C. Maybe one day they will click. As for the syntax, syntax is syntax.. once you got the logic, any language becomes fun.

~bud

Edit kudra, 2002-05-09 Added p tags

[Silicon Cactus]

Pointers in C?
One great use would be linked lists. Although I first learned about those in Ada, you should be able to do the same in C.


Although you probably already knew that one... :)

[Dr.Altaica]

I would have to say my secont favorit languge would be VRML verson 2. i'm not talking about VRMLscript I mean pure VRML. who needs veriables or fancy control logic. I had a three story elevator but this is what I could quickly find on the web(and was mine)

#VRML V2.0 utf8

PROTO doorx [
   field SFVec3f t 0 0 0
]
{
   Transform {
      translation IS t
      children [
         DEF doorts TouchSensor {
         }
         DEF ts TimeSensor {
            cycleInterval 10
            loop FALSE
         }
         DEF pi PositionInterpolator {
            key [
               0 .1 .9 1
            ]
            keyValue [
               .25 0 0 .75 0 0 .75 0 0 .25 0 0
            ]
         }
         DEF pi2 PositionInterpolator {
            key [
               0 .1 .9 1
            ]
            keyValue [
               -.25 0 0 -.75 0 0 -.75 0 0 -.25 0 0
            ]
         }
         DEF tr Transform {
            translation .25 0 0
            children [
               Shape {
                  geometry Box {
                     size .5 2.5 .01
                  }
               }
            ]
         }
         DEF tr2 Transform {
            translation -.25 0 0
            children [
               Shape {
                  geometry Box {
                     size .5 2.5 .01
                  }
               }
            ]
         }
      ]
   }
   ROUTE ts.fraction_changed TO pi.set_fraction
   ROUTE pi.value_changed TO tr.set_translation
   ROUTE doorts.touchTime TO ts.set_startTime
   ROUTE ts.fraction_changed TO pi2.set_fraction
   ROUTE pi2.value_changed TO tr2.set_translation
}

|\_/|
/o o\
(>_<)
 `-'

[greenFox]

Given perls heritage I am *really* surprised there is no generic shell option here to cover the various sh, ksh, sed, awk, etc... left me with no choice other than "other" :-(

--
my $chainsaw = 'Perl';

[robot_tourist]

I have only used a few languages over my short career and after Perl, Java has to be my favourite, it is the teaching language of my university's CS department, but that never put me off. I can't choose a worst between Object Pascal and Visual Basic, thankfully I haven't had to do too much with them. Object Pascal has your cartesian products, but is not Huffman coded and has other unsightly syntax features. Visual Basic is easy to get things going in but was so unintuitive for me, even though I loved my Commodore 64 BASIC. I never wrote anything useful for my C64, but I loved drawing my own sprites and peeking and poking that 64K of RAM. Now the sound chip is bust, but I have an emulator for when I need a quick classic game.

I have a wiry brain/each eye a camera. Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

[Anonymous Monk]

Why isn't Frink on the list? He'll make you laugh, he'll make you think... http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/

[Beatnik]

My other favorite language I've been using lately is Java... unfortunatly, school projects make me... no, FORCE me into programming in COBOL. This has resulted in lack of sleep, numerous nightmares and several head injuries from banging my head against the wall. I hereby would like to say to my COBOL professor... we finished the damn thing, don't ask us to OO it now or I'll just go nuts!
Update: Yes, I do have some code online...Call the COBOL comitee coz this is some BAD code!.

Greetz
Beatnik
... Quidquid cobol dictum sit, altum demens.

[johannz]

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say PL/SQL. Or any database programming language for that matter. Most of my perl coding is database related, including writting API's for various projects, and stored procedures, combined with a perl front-end, can't be beat.

I'm just wondering, do people not consider these programming langauges? I know the poll couldn't list every language but there was nothing database related in the poll.

[slok]

no REBOL as well... http://www.rebol.com

[rchiav]

Since when is ASP considered a language?

[mt2k]

I suppose I had to pick Visual Basic... besides Perl and QBASIC (eewww), I don't know anything else on that list besides JavaScript, and well, that does not qualify as a programming language, so that is excluded ;)

[Anonymous Monk]

Where's ADA?

[jotti]

C, a write-only language. Said someone. I agreed for a long time untill I got the clue. Now I go for C++.

[Hanamaki]

Befunge rulez!!!

[mtve]

Truly and everlastingly!

!v1.s vv"Just another Perl/Befunge hacker"*25 #v#<!
<<    q>:#,_@>;print/"(.*?)"/,$/;  just_sketch   ^0

[systems]

I picked python
well it really depend on why you need to learn programming
and how much resources do you have!
I study management information systems, so learn needed to
learn at least one programming language, and about the difference between programming languages in general.
When it comes to resources, I didnt have much!
So I head to find a language that I can learn almost for free, I searched the net and I found that only Java and python satisfy this need!
Plus python have Zope with is a nice framework for web/distributed application
Java have J2EE!
So anyway in this poll I had to pick one!
So I picked python, python seem to be better designed then Java, easier to use and learn!
What I like about perl is only perlmonks.org :P
nice place, nice community, programmers need this stuff to freshen up and keep work fun!
I will learn perl one day, but just for fun!

[jotti]

I'm learning Perl. And I haven't paid anything for it yet. Everything has been free, including this monastery.