What is the best alternative to APL?

You can use frameworks like Kivy, but if your ultimate goal is to write mobile apps Python may not be the best first choice.

A large subset of the Python community still uses / relies upon Python 2, which is considered a legacy implementation by the Python authors. Some libraries still have varying degrees of support depending on which version of Python you use. There are syntactical differences between the versions.

Python is abstracted far enough that if it's your first language, it will be harder to pick up lower level languages later versus going the other direction.

Most use of this language will be found in jobs supporting legacy code. It will be hard to find things to do with this language outside of that niche.

After the Wirth era, practically there is no official Pascal language standard. Delphi used to be the dé facto standard especially for industry, but today Free Pascal is starting to get better support. However, there are some other Pascal language variants such as Smart Pascal, Oxygene (from RemObj...

Clojure's error messages more often than not are very confusing. They usually involve stack traces that do not thoroughly explain where the error was caused or what caused it.

Some language constructs were obviously created as workarounds for JVM limitations. This makes the language much less elegant than it could have been. Also, the JVM has a very cumbersome FFI.

You can put anything in. This makes reasoning about code after a time has passed very hard.

Julia was released in 2012. Due to its short existence, there is a limited amount of support for the language. Very few libraries exist as of yet, and the community is still quite small (though growing quickly).

This design probably come from Matlab, but makes it unnatural to interface C and C++ and python.

You have generics, you have interfaces, you have inheritance, you have a lot of things at your disposal but you don't have Type Clases. They can be emulated using some clever constructs but there's nothing like having the real thing.

Haskell lends itself well to powerful abstractions - the result is that even basic, commonly used libraries, while easy to use, are implemened using a vocabularly that requires a lot of backround in abstract mathematics to understand. Even a concept as simple as "combine A and B" is ofte...

Haskell's language extensions, while making the language incredibly flexible for experienced users, makes a lot of code incredibly unfamiliar for beginners. Some pragmas, like NoMonomorphismRestriction, have effects that seem completely transparent in code, leading beginners to wonder why it...

Haskell allows users to define their own infix operators, even with their own precedence. The result is that some code is filled with foreign looking operators that are assumed to be special-case syntax. Even for programmers who know they're just functions, operators that change infix preceden...

When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find b...

Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages. Another thing that makes Lua different from other pr...

Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight.

Scala is an industrial language. It brings functional programming to the JVM, but not with a "start small and grow the language" perspective, but rather a very powerful language for professional programmers.

The type system is too complicated yet still less powerful than Haskell's.

Even for seasoned programmers it's a difficult language.

Because it's still a relatively new language, Rust does not enjoy a following as large as other languages/environments. Rust development has also been rather volatile for a long time during the beginning of the development of the language adding to this issue. Because of the small community,...

The issue of asynchronous I/O is still being discussed as a language feature, and not yet in the implementation phase. See the RFC on GitHub here.

There are little to none jobs searching for a Scheme programmer. The ones that exist are more related to Research in Maths or Artificial Intelligence.

Scheme is an IEEE standard, not an implementation. Unfortunately, the standard is too minimal and practical implementations have diverged--they had to expand on the standard to get anything done, but did so in incompatible ways. The later de facto standard R6RS tried to correct this, but lost Sch...

LISP-like languages are very different from mainstream languages (such as C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Python/you-name-it) - both in semantics and syntax. This, in turn, severely limits uses of whatever-learned-with-Scheme, for real-world use.

Starting off as a beginner with assembly language could prove very daunting. I suggest learning a high level language first (e.g. C) to get a good grasp of programming - especially dealing with bits, bytes, numbers, accessing memory with pointers (which is why I suggest C). Then once that person...

The instruction set may change depending on what CPU architecture is being used. Also, there will be some differences in implementations due to different assemblers being used, such as with changes in OS.

Some popular libs like JQuery have maintained externs, for any specific code or lib already in JS you have to write the externs to use it in your haxe application.

While it has great support in Visual Studio Code and Vim for example, it still lacks support in some IDEs such as IntelliJ.

There is currently no support for Qt.

If there are no .sh files, this will print mask itself: for filename in *.sh; do echo $filenamedone

In Bash, exceptions are the rule, not even all being described by the main page. There are a grand total of 5 different ways of quoting, sometimes even when one does not want to, for instance in command substitutions. These are all based around preserving the literal meaning of every character, wi...

What it is mostly used for are file system operations. Guess what it is bad at? Operating on files. It automatically splits and carries out filename expansion on every single string resulting from variable expansion and command substitution unless quoted, by default on whitespace, whilst spaces are...

Smalltalk missed an opportunity to become mainstream when its implementations cost $5000 per seat versus $0 open source. New open source implementations (Pharo, Squeak) have minor corporate backers but not yet an IT behemoth. Direct jobs are scarce (but indirectly Smalltalk experience is very we...

While Smalltalk is very powerful and easy to learn, it doesn't have a well supported mobile distribution, but you'll be spoiled for working in mainstream languages like Java, Swift or Kotlin where jobs are more readily available.

Smalltalk wants to be the whole OS. While this has tremendous advantages internally, interacting with the world outside the VM is not as easy as pure Smalltalk and must be done via a Foreign Function Interface.

Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird: Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end or receive do {:hello, msg} -> msg {:world,...

Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background.

The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design.

Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months.

Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product.

It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server.

We should hope Red Hat or anyone interested would take the time and write one. That would strengthen the maturity of the language, but Ceylon is rapidly developing which can make the author's efforts futile because his or hers work will become obsolete soon. The second hindrance is, of course,...

Ceylon 1.2 needs a language runtime of 1.55 MiB, and the Collection library adds another 370 KiB. That's a lot for the Web... Now, this has to be put in perspective: if you use Ceylon to make a web application, these files will be loaded once, then cached by the browser (that's not casual...