What is the best alternative to TouchDevelop?

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score 156 · Answer 1

Pascal / Object Pascal

Top Pro

Understanding of basics

Because of the verbosity and easy syntax, Pascal language is relatively easier to be learned and understood, even for someone who has no programming knowledge. It's said that Pascal code —if written well— is like reading pseudo code. See More

Top Con

Niche language

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. See More

Top Pro

Easy

Pascal / Object pascal was used in schools during the 2000's to teach kids the basics of object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

No up-to-date version of language standards

In 1983, and update in 1990, the language was standardized with two standards: ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal. However, Object Pascal extensions to the language have no official standards but in 1993, a draft proposal for object oriented Pascal standard was re; for review purposes only. There are no standards for modern features and enhancements, thus various Pascal dialects like Delphi or HP Pascal has their own enhancements and features. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Pascal development tools are available almost on every available platform, especially using Free Pascal. Pascal language is available on desktop like Mac, BSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc.; on mobile like iOS, Android, etc.; also on managed environments like Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and .Net/Mono framework . There are even some Pascal to JavaScript transpilers such as Smart Pascal, so you can write client side web app using Pascal as well, if you really want to. See More

Top Con

All variables, types, constants and functions must be declared at the beginning of the code

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Pascal's syntax is clear and concise, for example: procedure test(); begin DoSomething(); end; See More

Top Pro

Enforces good programming practice

Numerous strong compile time checks with optional runtime checks ensure one doesn't do stupid things and even when one does (because the compiler can't prove it at compile time), the binary will check and report it at runtime. Correct modular programming implementation with proper namespacing, no file inclusion hack. See More

Top Pro

Easy GUI creation

Visual Basic may have predated Delphi but Delphi was the ground breaking visual designer which set the standards expected today by most GUI developers. Its rich component set was well designed, structured and extensible, it even has the ability to display live data from the attached database in its data controls. See More

Top Pro

Assembler Code and DLL/SO creation

You can put Assembler code in Intel or AT&T formats, to achieve great results of speed and accuracy. It is possible to create Dynamic Link Libraries or their equivalent in Unix-like systems so it's relatively easy to use and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Fast compilation

The compiler is fast, really fast. Compared to C/C++, the delphi compiler is designed to compile a decent sized desktop application in seconds rather than minutes. See More

Top Pro

Well balanced for desktop development

For desktop development, Delphi is productive, the code is easy to understand, compilation speed is blazing, and it produces well performing applications that are easy to deploy. The perfect balance between C# and C++. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

Using the Free Pascal Compiler (the main Pascal distribution) you can code in a language that can be procedural and imperative now, but it can became object-oriented simply adding a directive at the start of the source See More

Top Pro

Tons of academic reading

Being known as the programming language for education, especially in the 90's, there many academic reading and tutorials available on the internet. See More

Top Pro

Rich existing libraries

Both shipped with implementations and spread all over the web. Both natively written or bindings to libraries written in other languages. Typically to build non-trivial applications there's no need to surf the web as many things are implemented already. Streaming, output templating, socket & networking, web, database, image manipulation, high performance graphics, (de)compression, (de|en)cryption, regex, unit testing, json manipulation, google API, indexing, multithreading, external process management, the list just goes on and on! See More

Top Pro

Language depth

Object Pascal is being used to write custom kernels (Ultibo) and operating-systems for various ARM boards. So the way you work with the code scales from low-level to pure OOP high-level. Object Pascal has the same level of depth that you find in C/C++ but with added productivity. See More

Top Pro

Extensive third party libraries

There are large collections of third party components, many free which enable developers to add wide ranging and complex functionality to their code with ease See More

Top Pro

Still active

From the early roots of Pascal, Delphi has been developed and is still actively supported. It is used in many desktop applications today, and even supports multi platform coding. See More

Top Pro

Fast execution

The compiler generates fast and optimized code. No stop-the-universe garbage collection. See More

Top Pro

Automatic Memory Management

The new Delphi compilers are powered by Automatic Reference Counting to ease development. See More

Top Pro

Excellent Database development

Top Pro

Incredible GUI design tools

Lazarus and Delphi are both incredible GUI design tools, making rapid development a reality. Making changes to a GUI doesn't mean switching tools or waiting for things to load, it's right there as part of your core tools. See More

Top Pro

Available on a ridiculous number of platforms

FreePascal is available on/for Intel x86 (including 8086), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, ARM, AArch64, MIPS and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD, Haiku, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, DOS (16 and 32 bit), Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, MorphOS, Nintendo GBA, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Android, AIX and AROS. See More

Top Pro

Component based (reusability, decoupled, rich design architecture)

Top Pro

Suitably close to modern languages, without the pitfalls

It was developed as a teaching language and it shows. No syntax pitfalls and gently encourages good style. See More

Top Pro

Reliable language and code base

Most code from the Turbo Pascal days in the 80s still compiles, yet the language has since been adapted and extended with modern concepts, introducing OOP and interfaces, exception handling, native Unicode support, anonymous methods, generics, ARC and more. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic evolution of language.

Specs

Price:Free (FreePascal, GNU Pascal), varying price (Delphi)

Standard:ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal

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156 50

score 6 · Answer 2

MS PowerShell

Top Pro

Helpful Help

The help system is designed to evolve over time; running update-help downloads the latest content. When searching for help on items, you can simply type help commandname to get information about a command. If you're not sure what you're looking for, but have a rough idea, you can search on partial command names, or even specify specific verbs to get a list of commands potentially of interest; e.g. help -verb write. The information in help gives a good overview of the commands you're looking at, along with code examples, so you can see real-world usage without resorting to the web. See More

Top Con

Very verbose

The commands themselves, as well as the output and error messages, are VERY verbose See More

Top Pro

Splatting

When calling a method with multiple parameters, rather than passing one variable per parameter you're able to "splat" one variable to the method, with the parameters taking their values from its properties. See More

Top Pro

Pipeline

Commands can be chained via the pipeline, allowing output from one to be cleanly fed as input to the next. See More

Top Pro

Chocolatey Package

PowerShell is installable through Chocolatey. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

The language can wrap and interact with code written in other language's, making it highly extensible. See More

Top Pro

Multi-Platform (ish)

Though Windows Powershell only works on Windows, the open source implementation Pash (http://pash.sourceforge.net/) allows the same language to be run on other OSes. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

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6 0

score 32 · Answer 3

Assembly

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

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 is comfortable writing C (or whatever high level language) programs, they would find moving to assembler a little less of a "What the hell?!!!" experience. See More

Top Pro

Low Level - it's how the computer works

One of the best ways to learn how a computer actually works is to work your way up from lower level abstractions. Assembly, being only a level above machine code, is low enough level to make it clear how the computer is actually performing a computation, including code flow and loops, but high enough level to not be excessively tedious for the type of small projects that a student would do at the beginning of their first programming class. Use of an assembler with macros can stretch this even a bit further. See More

Top Con

Rarely a requirement or used in professional employment

Top Pro

Naturally creates fast and small programs

Because of its natural syntax and low-level nature, assembly language programs are typically really small and fast. Unlike other programming languages, in assembly language it is really hard to create a slow and over-bloated program. See More

Top Con

Not very portable

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. See More

Top Pro

Useful for embedded systems

A curriculum that involves an embedded component, such as an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, can encourage students by allowing them to immediately connect their work with 'real systems'. Assembly is the ideal language for getting started with and understanding these devices, and since Assembly can be called from C, the code will still be useful if students move on to C later in the program. See More

Top Con

Hyperspecific syntax isn't a good first step to learning other modern languages

Top Pro

Uniform syntax

Assembly language syntax is relatively uniform, and so there's less room for a student to get confused by obscure characters, or miss some meaning implied by structure, such as with scoping rules, or call-by-name/value/reference semantics. While there may be a lot of mnemonics to look up, most work involves only a very small subset of them. See More

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32 54

score 42 · Answer 4

Tcl

Top Pro

Widely available

You can expect a reasonably recent version of Tcl to either installed or available in the repositories of any popular open source *nix. See More

Top Pro

Standard library

Unlike *sh Tcl has a rich standard library. See More

Top Pro

Sane quoting rules

Unlike in sh you don't need to quote your variable substitutions ('"$1"'). Expanding of arguments occurs mostly explicit and if yet expected in-place (e. g. using eval or subst) it follows strict and well clear rules. So exec test $argv would execute test with single argument. And appending {*} before $argv would execute test with all arguments (list expansion). See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

With a little care you can have the same script work on Linux, *BSD, OS X and Windows. See More

Top Pro

Everything is a string

Tcl can operate at the same level of abstraction as the POSIX shell, which makes it easier to manipulate the output of other programs. See More

Top Pro

Tk and Expect

Top Pro

Standalone packages

Tcl enables easy deployment through self-contained binaries known as starpacks. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Want to run something 5 times? Here you go: set i 0; time { puts done-[incr i] } 5 If you need real conditional cycle? Not a problem: for {set ready 0; set i 1} {$i <= 100 && !$ready} {incr i} { if {[exec do-some-thing] eq "ready" } {set ready 1} } Want to measure performance of something or repeat it max 300 times and not longer than 1 seconds? Very simple: timerate { after 20 } 1000 300 How about notifying yourself when some http-server is back online? Sure thing: while {[catch { close [socket localhost 80] }]} { after 1000 }; puts "\7\7\7ONLINE!" And you can do it also fully asynchronously using events etc. See More

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42 2

score 11 · Answer 5

Xtend

Top Con

Difficult to configure in Android Studio

Top Pro

Ruby-like syntactic conveniences

Lambdas are written like Smalltalk's blocks. If it's the last argument, it can go after the parentheses like Ruby's blocks. Parentheses on method calls are optional. See More

Top Con

Slower compilation

Unlike most JVM languages, Xtend compiles to Java rather than directly to JVM bytecode. So you have to compile everything four times for Android: from Xtend to Java, from Java to JVM bytecode (.class files), from .class to .dex bytecode, and then AOT compilation from .dex to native ARM upon installation. This can really slow down development and testing vs a more interactive language like Clojure. See More

Top Pro

Type inference

It uses Java's static type system, but you don't have to declare the type of everything all the time, since the Xtend compiler can usually figure it out. This also dramatically cuts down on Java's infamous verbosity. See More

Top Pro

Code runs just as fast as Java

Because Xtend relies heavily on JDK and Android classes, it runs just as fast as native Java code. See More

Top Pro

Easy to switch back to Java

Xtend is a low-risk option. Because it compiles to human-readable Java, if you decide you don't like it for your project, you can just switch back to Java without losing your work. See More

Top Pro

Extend even library classes with new methods

This is where it gets its name. You can open classes and add new methods, kind of like Ruby. (Of course this has to be compiled to Java, so really it lives in a kind of helper class.) See More

Top Pro

Succint

Uses functional features ,which are very concise and idiomatic. Plus it has annotations, which cuts down on the Java boilerplate. See More

Top Pro

Better defaults than Java

Methods are public if you don't specify, and fields are private. Locals declared with val in Xtend are final in Java. This dramatically cuts down on Java's infamous verbosity. See More

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11 2

score 15 · Answer 6

DASH

Top Pro

Default shell on Debian systems

DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead. See More

Top Con

Doesn't support all bash features

Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh. See More

Top Pro

Full POSIX support

It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells. See More

Top Pro

A perfect clone

It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell. See More

Top Pro

Fast startup

Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process. See More

Top Pro

Low memory usage, which matters a lot in embedded

It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX. See More

15 3

score 3 · Answer 7

Rebol

Top Pro

Human friendly

Almost natural language, for example: write %out.html read http://google.com. See More

Top Con

No separators

A function call expression has no parentheses, and there are no separators between sequenced expressions, not even newlines. This means that you have to know the arity of every function in an expression to know how to parse it. It also means you can run into subtle, hard-to-find bugs if you don't provide enough arguments, since the result of the next expression will be passed instead. See More

Top Pro

Homoiconic

Code is data, and data can be code. Rebol is based on a simple block data structure, used both for data and for the code itself. Blocks can be manipulated programmatically, and then evaluated as code. This makes metaprogramming easy in Rebol. See More

Top Con

Not (yet?) Free Software

Rebol 2's core is free (gratis) for commercial use, but the license prohibits modification, a violation of the DFSG. Rebol 3 is Free Software (Apache 2.0), but isn't production ready. See More

Top Pro

Graphical user interface

Beginners are usually stuck making command-line applications in other languages, because GUIs are too hard. Rebol GUIs are easy enough to start with. See More

Top Pro

Very simple syntax

Rebol's name came from "Relative Expression Based Object Language". Rebol is a functional language and everything is an expression that returns a value. Things that have to be baked into the grammar in other languages are simple function calls with block arguments in Rebol. See More

Top Pro

Domain specific languages

Rebol's simple homoiconic syntax makes it easy to create "Rebol dialects"--domain-specific languages optimized for a particular purpose. The Rebol distribution includes many of these, and users are free to create more. These DSLs make tasks that would be complicated to express in other languages easy. See More

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3 1

score 88 · Answer 8

bash

Top Pro

Default shell on most systems

Bash is the default shell on virtually every UNIX system. Making it very portable across different systems and once you get used to it, you can use it everywhere. See More

Top Con

Extremely complicated and inconsistent rules

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, with an exception list. There is even an exception list to the exception list in 4 of the 5, regarding how the backslash behaves! The behavior of the backslash is also one of the quoting rules, so naturally, it also has an exception in how it works when it stands before a newline as compared to other characters. Bash has several layers of interpretations, all to be kept in mind: The ~ expands to the home of the current user. So if you store it in a variable, can you use it that way? Nope: tilde expansion comes before variable expansion. Aha, so that's how it works! Then, since applying quotation happens after redirections are set up, it must mean that redirecting within quotes works, right? Nope: there is an exception! If a redirection symbol is not quoted, quotation around the symbol is observed, but is not removed. So, since variable expansion also comes after setting up redirections, and no exceptions are described here in the man page, getting the name of a file from a variable and using it as a target should not work, right? No: redirection does not actually take place when the symbols are being read, the symbols are merely removed and are noted for later, right before when the actual command runs. Apart from 5 types of quotation, there are basically 2 quoting phases, 2 word splitting phases (with only one being controllable), and a tokenization phase on top of that. If you have a command, it could be an alias, a special built in, a non-special built in, a symbolic link to a file, a regular file, a function, with different rules regarding how they can be overridden, if redirection happens before or after arguments have been passed (what does "time my_command 2>&1 >log_file" do?), etc. This list is admittedly long, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of the bloat, complexity and inconsistencies of Bash. See More

Top Pro

Plenty of examples and tutorials

Since this is very mature shell there is a lot of great examples and other resources describing how to do almost everything. See More

Top Con

No out-of-the-box command autocompletion

To have command autocompletion in bash you need to install third-party plug-ins. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

Want to run something 5 times? Write a throw-away loop: for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do date; done If you need it 100 times? Not a problem: for i in {1..100}; do date; done or: for ((i=0; i<100; ++i)); do date; done How about emailing yourself when remote server is back online? Sure thing: while ! ping -c1 example.com &>/dev/null; do date; sleep 5; done && mailx -s 'server is back!' me@myself.com See More

Top Con

Lags behind on features compared to ZSH and Fish

People who wants power features or to customize their shell experience use zsh or fish. See More

Top Pro

POSIX compatible

Top Con

Filename expansion is not consistent

filename expansion is not consistent. "echo *" will print the names of the files in your current dir, if there are any... and will print "*" if there are none. See More

Top Pro

Recursive globbing

ls **/*.log for example is supported by Bash if you set shopt -s globstar. See More

Top Con

Non-intuitive shell expansion in for loops

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

Top Pro

Built-in 'help'... helps a lot

Builtin 'help' provides quick and efficient help on builtins and keywords. See More

Top Con

One of the most dangerous languages around

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 very common in filenames. Before that, it even does pathname expansion, so woe to anywone who does not want to actually operate on files, but has a globbing metacharacter stored anywhere in a variable. This means what you store in a variable is not going to be what will ACTUALLY be accessed. If an empty variable is unquoted, it disappears completely due to word splitting, sometimes leading to applications signalling a missing parameter at a wrong position. If quoted however, said variables cannot be iterated over in a loop, no matter what character one uses for word splitting. If you use any globbing pattern with a command, be sure to use -- after the option arguments or if none are present, before starting the pattern with a mandatory ./ Otherwise, another Bash script run gone wrong or a hacker can create files named like an option ("-f", for instance) and your program will happily accept it as such, if it results from globbing. For interactive use, it is convenient. For programming, it is a no-go. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities

BASH scripting is a rich and robust language. See More

Top Pro

Variables and aliases are listed the way they are built

alias and set will list aliases and variables in a format that can be run directly with no modifications. Even if the values contain \n. This is handy if you want to modify a value. See More

Top Pro

Emacs-like keyboard control

By default, BASH uses shortcuts and concepts very similar to Emacs, so learning one often results in familiarity with the other. See More

Top Pro

Rich built-in features

By default, there are many built-in features. They make really complex and reliable programs possible. In comparison to dash, for example, you can do the same tasks in less time and fewer lines of code. See More

Top Pro

vi mode is more comprehensive than on other shells

Vi editing mode works without a glitch. "_" will print you the last argument of the latest command (zsh won't). VI mode is fast off the bat - You don't have to reset any variable (like "KEYTIMEOUT" in zsh) for that. See More

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88 24

score 129 · Answer 9

ClojureScript

Top Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time. See More

Top Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries. See More

Top Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece). See More

Top Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Top Pro

Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment. See More

Top Pro

Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process. See More

Top Pro

The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure: Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure. Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation. See More

Specs

Price:Open Source

Site:https://clojurescript.org/

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:32 kB

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129 34

score 61 · Answer 10

Pharo

Top Pro

Object-Oriented

In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well. See More

Top Con

Small community

But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous. See More

Top Pro

Easily learnt

There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired. See More

Top Con

Single threaded

Pharo's VM only ever uses one CPU core. If you want to write code that uses more than one CPU core, you need to jump through hoops such as running multiple VMs and synchronising your data. See More

Top Pro

Live updates

The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time. See More

Top Con

No stable 64 bit VM on Windows yet (work-in-progress)

64 bit support is on its way for Windows (experimental). Pharo 7 has 64 bit support for Mac and Linux as of Pharo 7. See More

Top Pro

Highly productive

Top Pro

Seaside

The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably. See More

Top Pro

Remote debugging

Top Pro

Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE

No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too). See More

Top Pro

Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector

Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code. See More

Top Pro

Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment

Top Pro

64 bit support as of Pharo 7

Use 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Pharo on Windows, Mac & Linux See More

Top Pro

Advanced code analysis tools

MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement. See More

Top Pro

Can run headless for production

Top Pro

Really simple networking and REST with Zinc

Top Pro

Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal

Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work. See More

Specs

Platforms:MacOSX; Linux; Windows

License:MIT

Price:Free / Open Source

Auto Complete:Y

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61 19

score 214 · Answer 11

Haxe

Top Pro

Compiles to multiple platforms and languages

Haxe allows you to develop for Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux and others, all at once, without the need to switch languages and maintain separate code bases. This is possible because Haxe can compile to JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash AVM bytecode, C++, Neko, PHP, C# (.NET) and Java. Support for even more platforms and languages is under development. See More

Top Con

Bad support in some popular IDEs

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

Top Pro

Powerfully expressive but easy to learn

The language was designed to be very expressive with the smallest possible amount of syntactic sugar. There are actually fewer keywords than other languages with similar power. See More

Top Con

You need to code interfaces to work with existing JavaScript code

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. See More

Top Pro

Pick up errors at compile time

One big advantage over pure javascript, (or some other languages listed here) is that Haxe will pick up a whole range of errors when you compile, saving you the pain of having to try and debug them later. This includes everything from syntax errors ("Unexpected ;") to type errors ("Class user has no field username. Suggestion: username"). See More

Top Con

No Qt support

There is currently no support for Qt. See More

Top Pro

First class code completion

Code completion is built into the compiler and available to the IDE allowing for much smarter code completion that can actually parse and understand the syntax tree. See More

Top Con

Full programs only

You can create small utility functions with Haxe, but generally it is a lot more work than with other JS compilers. Haxe is best used when you have a larger project. See More

Top Pro

Syntactic macros

Syntactic macros allow you to extend compiler features at the syntax tree step. Macros come into play after code is parsed into the abstract syntax tree, and macros allow you to transform it before the rest of the compilation completes. This provides for immense power, while at the same time scoping the extensibility at a level that is powerful, but well constrained. See More

Top Con

It's not easy to convince people it's as good as it really is unless you can get them to really try it

Top Pro

Code reuse server side and client side

You can use the same classes on the server as you do on the client where applicable. This saves a lot of time. See More

Top Pro

Extremely fast compilation

Haxe can easily compile over 100,000 lines of code to JS in seconds on a mid-spec computer. See More

Top Pro

Ability to use existing JS libraries

Haxe has the ability to use "externs". These are haxe files which describe the usage of existing JS libraries. Get code completion and compile-time-checking for everything from jQuery to Node.js. Even without externs, native JS code can still be used through untyped code. See More

Top Pro

Similar to JavaScript and ActionScript 3

The language is very easy to learn for those with background in JavaScript or ActionScript 3. See More

Top Pro

Small, readable output

The output that is generated can be trimmed using "dead code elimination" to only include those functions and libraries that are strictly necessary. All code is very readable with only minimal extras for specific functionality. Small output is good for frontend development as file size is a major concern. See More

Top Pro

Powerful type inference with strong typing

After a type is inferred from its context, it cannot be changed to a new type, and type safety is done at compile time so it stays safe without the extra maintenance required for static typing. See More

Top Pro

Algebraic data types and pattern matching.

Top Pro

Large library support. From servers to games.

Haxelib (common library repo) and other sources contain large codebases for anything from cryptography to communications. A lot of these are fully cross platform and work with the JavaScript target. The JavaScript target can be used for everything from node.js server applications (with code completion) to games using either the Flash-like OpenFL library or direct canvas or WebGL programming. See More

Top Pro

Established project

Haxe has been around for more than 10 years (since 2005) and whilst not the most popular project, has had continuous growth. Highly unlikely to disappear or for support to stop. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

Friendly community See More

Top Pro

Offload execution to the server with remoting

Using a remoting proxy you can get type safe server to client communications, allowing for remote method execution on the server as if they were part of the client side code. See More

Top Pro

Package management like Java

Package tree is just directory tree, it's wonderful! See More

Top Pro

Builtin conditional compilation support

Haxe supports conditional compilation, so depending on compiler flags Haxe will include or exlcude sections of your code. Making it easy to have debug and release builds. See More

Top Pro

Abstract enums allow constants with exhaustiveness check

You can define constants in an abstract enum and when used in a switch/case statement Haxe checks for exhaustiveness, making sure every constant is covered - with no runtime implication. See More

Top Pro

Type safety for exísting JS libraries

Haxe compiler will check types when using externs for existing libraries. See More

Top Pro

Available in NPM

Top Pro

Ability to skip type checking when calling non Haxe code

You should use externs when calling non Haxe code, but if you just need to call one or two external JS functions, you can skip type checking by calling untyped code. See More

Top Pro

Create without needing to be limited to a language, target, or commercial ecosystem

Top Pro

Abstracts allows me to create more intative api's without runtime overhead

Top Pro

Can create complex applications without needing webpack, npm or other crutches

Haxe has the power and expression to not need the npm dependancy hell that is common in js and typescript, bit it's still simple. See More

Specs

Platforms:Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:https://haxe.org/

Current stable version:4.0.3

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214 55

score 49 · Answer 12

Xojo

Top Pro

Easy to use

Easy to make compiled native apps. See More

Top Con

Subscription-based/Not free

Using this product you're betting the company will still be around. If they get bought out by an enterprise that wants to use the tech internally, all they need to do is stop offering subscriptions and suddenly you're scrambling to rebuild your entire app on other technology. See More

Top Con

No Android support

They plan to eventually support Android, but for now, they only support iOS. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Pi, Web,iOS

Visual GUI Builder:Yes

49 16

score 443 · Answer 13

Clojure

Top Pro

Immutability is the default

Clojure programmers are highly encouraged to use immutable data in their code. Therefore, most data will be immutable by default. State change is handled by functions (for transformations) and atoms (an abstraction that encapsulates the idea of some entity having an identity). See More

Top Con

Confusing error messages

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. See More

Top Pro

Minimal syntax

Being a LISP, programs are simple: they're just functions and data. That it doesn't get bogged down with syntax or the loftier FP concepts like monads makes it one of most approachable functional languages for beginners. See More

Top Con

Syntax can be alien / jarring for those used to other Lisps

Perhaps some may consider this attribute an advantage, but I do not. Clojure does not attempt to maintain significant compatibility with other Lisps. So, if you already know a Lisp or are used to the way Lisp works in general, you'll probably be confused if you take a look at Clojure. See these resources for more details on this subject: https://clojure.org/reference/lisps http://stackoverflow.com/q/6008313/2636454 http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-major-difference-between-clojure.html http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/153128/166211 See More

Top Pro

Tries to solve problems as simply as possible

Simplicity is one of the pillars on which Clojure is built. Clojure tries to solve many problems in software development as simply as possible. Instead of building complex interfaces, objects or factories, it uses immutability and simple data structures. See More

Top Con

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations.

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. See More

Top Pro

Good for writing concurrent programs

Since Clojure is designed for concurrency, it offers things like Software Transaction Memory, functional programming without side-effects and immutable data structures right out of the box. This means that the development team can focus their energies on developing features instead of concurrency details. See More

Top Pro

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

There's a very large ecosystem of high-quality Clojure libraries which developers can use. One example is Incanter. It's a great data analytics library and a very powerful tool for dealing with matrices, datasets and csv files. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Clojure compiles to JVM bytecode and runs inside the JVM. This means that applications written in Clojure are cross-platform out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Rich Hickey

The creator is so awesome, he's a feature. Just look up his talks and see why. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Clojure has an elegant macro system which enables language additions, Domain-specific languages (DSLs), to be created much easier than most other languages (with the exception of Racket, perhaps). See More

Top Pro

Dynamic language

A superb data processing language. While rich type and specification systems are available they are optional. See More

Top Pro

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

Leiningen is a very useful tool for Clojure developers. It helps wiht automation, configuration and dependency management. It's basically a must for every Clojure project. See More

Top Pro

No C/Java syntax

Refreshing, BTW! See More

Top Pro

Game is available with which you can learn Clojure

Nightmod is a tool used to make "live-moddable" games. It displays the game's code while you are playing and allows you to inject new code using Clojure. This can be a fun and useful experience for people trying to learn Clojure. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:www.clojure.org

Current stable version:1.10.1

See All Specs

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443 105

score 236 · Answer 14

Nim

Top Pro

Great metaprogramming features

There are generics, templates, macros in Nim. They can allow you to write new DSL for your application, or avoid all boilerplate stuff. See More

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Nim has a lot of common with Python in terms of syntax. Indentation-based syntax, for/while loops. See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with another languages

You can use Nim with any language that can be interfaced with C. There's a tool which helps you to create new C and C++ bindings for Nim - c2nim. Also, you can use Nim with Objective C or even JavaScript (if you're compiling for these backends). See More

Top Pro

Garbage-collected

You don't need to deal with all those manual memory allocations, Nim can take care of it. But also you can use another GC, or tweak it for your real-time application or a game. See More

Top Pro

Compile-time execution

Nim has a built-in VM, which executes macros and some other code at compile time. For example, you can check if you're on Windows, and Nim will generate code only for it. See More

Top Pro

Really cross-platform

The same code can be used for web, server, desktop and mobile. See More

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

You can use unicode names for variables, there is "unicode" module for operations with unicode. See More

Top Pro

Type interferencing

You only need to specify types in your procedures and objects - you don't need to specify type when you're creating a new variable (unless you're creating it without initialization). See More

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

Imperative, OOP, functional programming in one language. See More

Top Pro

Has built-in unittest module

With built-in "unittest" module you can create test with a very readable code. See More

Top Pro

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

writeLine(stdout, "hello") can be written as stdout.writeLine("hello") proc add(a: int): int = a + 5 can be used like 6.add.echo or 6.add().echo() See More

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

Nim has "asyncdispatch" module, which allows you to write async applications. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, MacOS/iOS, Linux /Android/Termux, *BSD, Solaris/SmartOS, HaikuOS, lots of others

License:MIT

CPU:All CPU architectures that have an ANSI C compiler

Site:https://nim-lang.org

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236 65

score 144 · Answer 15

Julia

Top Pro

Strong dynamic typing

Dynamic and high level, but does not isolate the user from properly thinking about types. Can do explicit type signatures which is great for teaching structured thinking. See More

Top Con

Young language with limited support

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). See More

Top Pro

Almost as fast as C

Julia runs almost as fast as (and in fact in some cases faster than) C code. See More

Top Con

1-based array and column major

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

Top Pro

Great standard REPL

Out of the box Julia has a very good Read-Eval-Print-Loop, which both completes functions and types, as well as completion based on history of previous statements. It integrates well with the shell and has an excellent online help system. See More

Top Pro

Powerful n-dimensional arrays

Julia has built in n-dimensional arrays similar in functionality as Python's numpy. See More

Top Pro

Function overloading

You can have multiple functions with the same name, but doing different things depending on function arguments and argument types. See More

Top Pro

High-level code

Julia provides a high level of abstraction, making platform-independent programming trivial and easing the learning curve. See More

Top Pro

Amazing learning curve

Julia requires no boilerplate code – a beginner needs to write only the parts they care about. This combined with the REPL provides the best learning experience available. See More

Top Pro

Nice regular syntax

Julia code is easy to read and avoid a lot of unnecessary special symbols and fluff. It uses newline to end statements and "end" to end blocks so there is no need for lots of semicolons and curly braces. It is regular in that unless it is a variable assignment, function name always comes first. No need to be confused about whether something is a method on an object or a free function. Unlike Python and Ruby, since you can annotate the types a function operates on, you can overload function names, so that you can use the same function name for many data types. So you can keep simple descriptive function names and not have to invent artificial function names to separate them from the type they operate on. See More

Top Pro

Written in itself

The Julia language is written in itself to a much larger extent than most other languages, so a budding programmer can read through the depths of the standard library and learn exactly how things work all the way down to the low-level bit-twiddling details, which can be englightening. See More

Top Pro

Function and operator broadcasting

You can perform operations on scalars, for example 2^2 or [1, 2, 3].^2. See More

Top Pro

REPL-based

The Julia REPL allows quickly testing how some code behaves and gives access to documentation and package management immediately in the REPL. See More

Top Pro

Strong Metaprogramming

Julia allows you to edit Julia code in the language itself and write powerful macros. It is a great introduction to metaprogramming features See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD

Site:julialang.org

Current stable version:1.4

Type Model:Dynamically Typed

See All Experiences

144 43

score 106 · Answer 16

Common Lisp

Top Pro

Very Powerful REPL with SLIME

SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs). See More

Top Pro

Carefully designed for interactive use

Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind. See More

Top Pro

Condition/restart system

It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL. See More

Top Pro

Image based runtime

The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program. See More

Top Pro

Almost as fast as, or faster than, C

Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code. See More

106 36

score 166 · Answer 17

Smalltalk

Top Pro

Environment of live objects

You can modify the system as it's running. You're "swimming with the fish", instead of probing a black box by remote control. See More

Top Con

OO is becoming obsolete

Smalltalk did it best, but the whole paradigm is a poor fit for the expected future multicore processors. Isolated mutable variables with no compile checks is a recipe for race conditions in multithreaded code. Beginners would be better off learning a functional language. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn and experiment

Top Con

Not common

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 well regarded). Online communities are relatively small. See More

Top Pro

Elegant syntax fits on a postcard

The syntax was designed to be easy enough for children to learn. Beginners can learn the language rules very quickly and then focus on programming without fighting the syntax at the same time. Things that have to be baked into the grammar in other languages are simple message sends with block arguments in Smalltalk. Expressions have only three precedence levels to worry about. See More

Top Con

Not useful for mobile development

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. See More

Top Pro

Pure and easy object orientation

Smalltalk is one of few languages that are purely object oriented. This provides a solid and easy to understand base on which to learn object oriented programming, the most popular approach to programming. See More

Top Con

Virtual machine in its own isolated world

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. See More

Top Pro

Superb Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

All tools (Inspector, Browser, Debugger etc.) are written in Smalltalk and are live objects in the environment. All sources are present, so that the tools can easily be studied, changed and experimented with. The same goes for the other components like the compiler, OS-Integration etc. See More

Top Con

Non-standard arithmetic ordering

Since every operation is considered a message sent sent is a specific order, all arithmetic operators have the same precedence. E.g. 2 + 3 x 4 translates to 2 + 3, and the result is multiplied by 4, giving an answer of 24 (instead of the correct answer - 14). Once you are learn this, it can easily handled using brackets, e.g. 2 + (3 x 4), but still a momentary suprise for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Agile "interactive" test-driven development

Smalltalk had the original (and still the best) unit test system that inspired it in many other languages (like Java's JUnit). Working with interactive live objects in Smalltalk style TDD makes it easy to teach and learn TDD. See More

Top Pro

Powerful integrated debugger

You can edit code and swap it in while the program is still running after an exception has already been signaled, or restart from anywhere in the call stack. You can inspect and modify the state of any object. Some Smalltalkers write unit tests and then program exclusively in the debugger. See More

Top Pro

Inspector makes objects transparent

Programmers must make detailed mental models of the system they are developing. Bugs usually happen when the mental model does not match the actual system. This is one of the greatest difficulties beginners have because most systems are so opaque. It takes a lot of effort to see what's really going on. But in Smalltalk this is much easier, thanks to the powerful tools included in the environment, like the object inspector. See More

Top Pro

Internal source code and documentation

You can explore how everything works easily. See More

Top Pro

Incremental compilation

Smalltalk provides an extremely fast code-compile-run-debug cycle. You don't have to stop and reset the world to tweak your program, since you can compile one method at a time while the environment is still running. This is great for beginners to experiment and prototype ideas. See More

Top Pro

Inspired many other languages' object systems

Top Pro

Open source

MIT licensed implementations Pharo, Squeak, Cuis & Dolphin and GPL licensed GnuSmalltalk. See More

Top Pro

Save and restore virtual machine image

A Smalltalk environment can save the state of a running program and later restore and resume execution. This includes the internal state of live objects, multiple thread stacks, and debugging sessions, making it easier for beginners to take the exact problem to an expert for assistance. See More

Top Pro

Language uniformity

This leads to a very simple programming model (pure OO) that is still very powerful. A lot of stuff that is hard to implement in other languages is easier in Smalltalk. See More

Top Pro

Graphical user interface

Beginners are usually stuck making command-line applications in other languages, because GUIs are too hard. Smalltalk GUIs are easy enough to start with. See More

Top Pro

First-class functions with lexical closures

Also known as "blocks". These objects contain reusable snippets of code and as first-class objects they can be passed as arguments to other methods or blocks and also returned from them. "lexical closures" mean they retain access to the variables in the lexical environment they were written in, that is, in the surrounding code. See More

Top Pro

It invented a lot of stuff

Smalltalk is the inventor of Just-in-Time compilation and the MVC concept, refactoring through their so-called refactoring browser and it was also one of the first adopters of a language virtual machine, closures, live programming, test driven development, an IDE and the development of GUI`s. See More

Top Pro

As a first language, almost forces you to learn OO design

Hybrid languages (e.g., Java, C#, C++) make it easy to slip into procedural thinking. Smalltalk's pure OO approach makes it hard not to think in object-oriented terms. In addition, since the entire IDE and runtime components are there in the image for you to browse, you have plenty of examples of good OO design to learn from. See More

Top Pro

Provides a functional way to interact with objects

Many languages today use object orientation, while the most of them stock on the half way in that perspective. Smalltalk sees literally everything as an object and this includes things like the classes and primitive data types. There is are zero control structures such as selection and iteration, since all is done by sending messages to objects. It use a lot of concepts from Lisp in order to provide a nice experience for this pure kind of object orientation. It provides immutable data structures, closures, anonymous functions and higher order functions, while all those functions are objects. This is what makes Smalltalk so simple, elegant, and easy. All this counts for Pharo, while other implementations as Amber are probably feature complete to it. See More

Specs

OS:Windows, macOS, Linux

Current stable version:6.1

GZipped size:38MB

IDE Support:Self-Hosted

See All Experiences

166 53

score 386 · Answer 18

Elm

Top Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests. See More

Top Con

limited js interop

only one way ports are available as a crude js FFI. This means you can only call functions both directions but will not get a result. See More

Top Pro

Inferred static typing

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do. See More

Top Con

Lack of typeclasses

Elm doesn't have typeclasses which means some code needs to be duplicated. A fix in a function that needs typeclasses means all of the duplicates need to be fixed too. See More

Top Pro

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven. See More

Top Con

Code Repetition

Because of the lack of genericness Elm needs a lot of code to be repeated. There are 130+ implementations of map in elms core libraries. See More

Top Pro

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable. See More

Top Con

Community harsh if criticised

If one even dares to start a discussion about a feature on elms slack, discord, subreddit or github one will be aggressively shut down often argueing that one should use purescript instead See More

Top Pro

Designed around high-level front-end development

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web. See More

Top Con

Poor Windows support

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

Top Pro

Growing community

Top Con

Harder to get buy-in from devs and mgmt

It's a total divergence from what most people are used to in the JS ecosystem. The change in syntax can be scary, the change in approaching problems can be scary. The fact that it's not backed by FANG can be scary. The fact that it's not v1.0 can be scary. The governance model and the deliberately slow release cadence can be scary. There are a couple harsh medium articles, hackernews/reddit posts out there made by people with an ax to grind that can be scary if you don't have a better picture of the Elm community, the tradeoffs that have been made, or the benefits to be had over other options. None of these are good reasons to write off further investigation of a great tech, but it happens. See More

Top Pro

Static module system

Elm uses easy to use modules. Use: import List import List as L import List exposing (..) import List exposing ( map, foldl ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) ) Creation: module MyModule exposing (foo, bar) See More

Top Con

Good for beginners not good for experts

Development in elm is quite nice until you need some more advanced features. These however are actively discontinued and removed because elm wants to establish a "single way of doing things" philosophy See More

Top Pro

Batteries included

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in. See More

Top Con

Features get removed without warning

Often features that are deemed to be misused by the community like infix operators get removed without much of a warning. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included. See More

Top Con

Updates break existing code often

The last few updates of elm broke existing code in major ways. See More

Top Pro

Missing syntactic sugar

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what. See More

Top Con

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

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

Top Pro

Good tooling

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type. See More

Top Con

Functional programming itself has quite a steep learning curve

Functional programming can be quite difficult to get your head around. It takes time to unlearn object orientational habits. See More

Top Pro

Not quite Haskell semantics

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible. See More

Top Con

No Genericness in the future

Currently there is no code genericness like typeclasses possible, it has been officially stated that this will never change. See More

Top Pro

Higher confidence in code correctness and quality

Pure functions, immutable data structures, amazing compiler, clean and homologous syntax used for HTML, logic, and optionally to replace CSS, elimination of entire classes of bugs so you don't even need most unit tests. These factors lead to better code, better programs, higher confidence, and ultimately, more satisfaction. See More

Top Con

Not database-friendly

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. See More

Top Pro

Easy to code review

The lack of side-effects and simple, consistent language semantics make it easy to quickly review incoming changes. See More

Top Con

No Syntactic Sugar

Often you need to write longer and less readable code because there are no alternatives that are more concise. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

Price:Open Source

Site:http://elm-lang.org/

Current stable version:0.19

See All Specs

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386 113

score 268 · Answer 19

Kotlin

Top Pro

Great tooling support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc... See More

Top Con

May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin

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. See More

Top Pro

Easy adoption for existing Java programmers

Kotlin runs on the JVM and Java interoperability has been one of the main objectives since the language was born. It runs everywhere Java does; web servers, mobile devices (Android), and desktop applications. It also works with all the major tools in the Java ecosystem like Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Spring Boot, etc. All of this makes adoption extremely easy even for existing Java projects. On top of this there's also ensured Type safety and less boilerplate code needed. See More

Top Con

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

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

Top Pro

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference. See More

Top Pro

No runtime overhead

The standard library is relatively small and tight. It mostly consists of focused extensions of the Java standard library and as such adds no additional runtime overhead to existing Java projects. See More

Top Pro

Officially supported for Android development

Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch. This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++). See More

Top Pro

Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases

Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself. See More

Top Pro

Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming

It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either. See More

Top Pro

Is built to solve industrial problems

Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

Current stable version:1.3

See All Experiences

268 83

score 411 · Answer 20

Elixir

Top Pro

Great documentation

Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal. See More

Top Con

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Top Pro

Great for concurrency

Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM See More

Top Con

Some design choices may seem strange

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, msg} -> "won't match" end See More

Top Pro

Great getting started tutorials

The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly. See More

Top Pro

Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP

All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love. See More

Top Pro

Full access to Erlang functions

You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html See More

Top Pro

Powerful metaprogramming

Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself. See More

Top Pro

Scalability

Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers. More details can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Easy to download libraries

Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get See More

Specs

Price:Open source (Free)

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Current stable version:1.9.4

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

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