What is the best alternative to LiveScript?

Question

Built By the Slant team

Find the best product instantly.

4.7 star rating

Try it now - it's free

score 77 · Answer 1

Swift

Top Pro

Modern syntax

Top Con

Swift is a moving target

They've released 1.2 so far, and 2.0 is coming soon. Every small update brings adjustments to paradigms (such as how to do type casting) that can be a little frustrating to absorb. Objective C was also constantly updating, however, but not at the same rate these days. See More

Top Pro

Swift is closer to other platforms

Apple’s modern programming language is easier to understand for non-iOS developers and minimizes time for additional explanations and clarifications. Moreover, Swift can be used as a script language. It is an interesting solution for the iOS community to unify writing of build scripts. At the time being iOS developers are split up in regard to this activity. Some of them write build scripts in Bash, others use Ruby, Python, etc. Swift gives an amazing opportunity to be applied to all iOS programming needs. More details can be found here https://mlsdev.com/blog/51-7-advantages-of-using-swift-over-objective-c See More

Top Pro

Works with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks

Top Pro

Can be used as a Just-In-Time language

Top Pro

Inherent parallelism

Top Pro

Low memory footprint due to reference counting

Top Pro

Backed by Apple

Top Pro

Performance speed comparable to native C

Top Pro

Swift has some clever tricks up its sleeve

Due to having elements of a functional programming language. Things like 'map' and 'filter' for example. See More

Top Pro

Uses LLVM compiler and Obj-C runtime allowing C, Objective-C, Objective-C++ and Swift code to run side by side within a single program

Specs

Platforms:Mac, Linux

See All Experiences

77 57

score 109 · Answer 2

PureScript

Top Pro

Higher kinded types

Has Typeclasses and RankNTypes See More

Top Con

Lots of dependencies needed to get started

Purescript is written in Haskell, but meant to be used with Node.js. As a result, to get started , users must install ghc, cabal, node.js, grunt, and bower. Purescript also has its own compiler, and different semantics form Haskell, and so even after installing, there's still some overhead to getting productive with Purescript. See More

Top Pro

High performance FFI code

The Eff monad, which is used for FFI code, optimizes out calls to bind, and supports tail call optimization, resulting in clean, efficient Javascript. The psc compiler also specifically recognizes the ST monad, and transforms scoped variables into mutable Javascript variables, for even more efficient code. See More

Top Con

Lack of good IDE/tooling support

Top Pro

Type safety

Compiling should be your first unit test. A tight type system (static and hopefully strong) will catch many logic errors that are often difficult to spot through debugging. In languages like PureScript, if it compiles, it often runs properly. See More

Top Con

Documentation not updated

Top Pro

Pure functional language

You cannot have side effects, unless a function is explicitly defined as so. See More

Top Con

Ecosystem not stable

Top Pro

Modules can be compiled to CommonJS

Modules compiled to CommonJS can be included with 'require', making it incredibly simple to call Purescript code from Javascript. See More

Top Con

Restrictive FFI

Functions exported are all curried, and must be called as such from Javascript. The FFI syntax for importing Javascript functions, while slightly simpler and more readable than UHC/Fay's, means that calls to methods on objects must be wrapped to pass the object explicitly as a parameter. See More

Top Pro

Has row polymorphism and extensible effects

Top Con

Slow compilation

On large project, for example Halogen See More

Top Pro

FFI

FFI system is quite good and easy to use. You can import functions curried or not curried. Records and arrays use native JS objects and arrays. See More

Top Pro

Thorough documentation

The Purescript website has fairly thorough documentation for all of the language's features, and the Purescript blog contains several examples of practical usage. See More

Top Pro

Awesome web frameworks

Thermite (React) Halogen (VDOM, similar to ELM) And hit these up with Signals, Isolated/(Managed?) Components, powerful functions and FFI See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.15.4

See All Experiences

109 26

score 252 · Answer 3

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

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 Con

No Qt support

There is currently no support for Qt. 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 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

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 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

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

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 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 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

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 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

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

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

Top Pro

Algebraic data types and pattern matching.

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

Specs

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

Supported languages:C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PHP, Lua, Python, Actionscript

See All Experiences

252 70

score 52 · Answer 4

Idris

Top Pro

Full dependent types

Idris not only has support for type classes, but is a fully dependently typed language, giving you the full power to statically verify your code. See More

Top Con

Not widely used

Top Pro

Domain driven design and type driven development

Because of full dependent types in Idris, the programmer can focus more on modelling the domain with types and waste less time fixing common bugs that the type checker will catch. Dependent types help apply type driven development and a lot of code auto generation, making the compiler and type checker an ally in developing working software instead of just getting in the way. See More

Top Con

Not widely used

Top Con

Weaker type inference

As type inference is undecidable for dependently-typed languages, Idris cannot offer the full type inference that Haskell supports, and so more type annotations will be needed. See More

Top Con

Different semantics from Haskell

Idris, while similar to Haskell, has strict semantics, which may cause some confusion if your backend is done in Haskell. If using Idris, it would make sense to do the backend in Idris as well, if not for the fact that Idris currently has fewer libraries available for web development than Haskell. See More

52 22

score 275 · Answer 5

Dart

Top Pro

Great async language support

Dart is a single threaded programming language. So if any piece of code blocks the execution of the program, the program practically freezes. To avoid this Dart makes use of asynchronous operations which let your program run without getting blocked. This is done through Future objects. A Future is an object which represent a means for getting a value at a certain point in the future. A function may invoke a Future and when that happens, two outcomes can be achieved: The function is unable to return a value, so it queues up work to be done and returns an uncompleted Future object. Or later when a value is available to be returned, the Future object completes with that value. See More

Top Con

Doesn’t generate consumable JavaScript at present

Dart builds to JavaScript but the entire app needs to be built to JavaScript at once for now (that may change in the future). See More

Top Pro

Great standard library

Dart includes a truly comprehensive core library, making it unnecessary to include disparate, external resources for basic functionalities Other than reducing the need to pull in various 3rd-party utilities this also ensures that all Dart code looks and feels the same. Out of the box, the developer gets core libraries to help with: async, collections, strings, regexps, conversions, formats, file I/O, math, typed data, and more. See More

Top Con

Still many holes to fill while converting code to Javascript

While implementing callbacks, passing a type to any function that gets passed to Javascript causes the dart2js compiler to crash. See More

Top Pro

No compile time in development

Dartium (Chromium derivative) is a browser with integrated Dart VM, which allows you to run and debug native Dart code during development for short edit-reload cycles. Only for testing on other browsers and deployment is transpiling to JS necessary. See More

Top Con

Dart SDK does not provide standard (out of the box) way to access SQL-based databases on server side

This missing (but very popular) feature requires to use 3rd-party packages developed by the personal enthusiasts or very small groups of enthusiasts, which is not very convenient because they are all very fragmented in terms of content, the essence and capabilities. See More

Top Pro

A lot of tools are available to help in developing with Dart

Dart has a lot of tools available which help with developing Dart applications. Some examples of those tools include: pub - package and dependency management and build tool analyzer - static syntax analysis with linter, quick fixes, autocompletion support for easy IDE integration test - powerful and flexible testing framework and test runner dev_compiler - generate reusable JS instead of tree-shaken minified JS output (work in progress) dartfmt_ - source code formatter server-side VM observatory - a powerful tool for profiling and debugging running Dart code (for Dartium and Dart server code) See More

Top Con

Small community, little momentum

Top Pro

Transpiled JavaScript code works on all browsers

In Dart many browser differences (subtle differences and also missing features) are abstracted away or polyfilled. When Dart is transpiled to JS the output works on all supported browsers. There is usually no need to load polyfills or to consider browser differences during development. No need for libraries like jQuery to make the same code work the same on all browsers. See More

Top Con

May be difficult to use some JavaScript libraries

Dart is much more than a programming language, it's a platform with its own standard libraries and tools. It's a major departure from JavaScript itself (even though it can compile to JS) that it's not possible to directly interact with JavaScript libraries in Dart. Instead, you have to use a special interop library which exposes the wrapped versions of the JavaScript objects that you are accessing. While this enables Dart to sandbox JavaScript so that its problems do not leak into a Dart application, it also means that it may be cumbersome to use libraries which don't have a wrapper library available. See More

Top Pro

Will be familiar to Java developers

The language will look familiar to Java developers, easing the learning curve. And yet, while it's similar, it has some nice syntax facilities to avoid common boilerplate code found in Java. Code is terser, yet readable. See More

Top Pro

Easy prototyping

Dart has an optional type system which makes Dart a great language for prototyping. It encourages developers to gradually evolve their programs without worrying about types first. See More

Top Pro

Can compile to efficient machine code

Dart was designed to be as expressive as possible. Ahead-of-time compilers can compile Dart code to efficient machine code. This is especially important when deploying to mobile where you don't want (or can't) use a JIT. See More

Top Pro

AngularDart 2.0 support

Top Pro

Optional strong mode.

Strong mode applies a more restrictive type system to Dart to address its unsound, surprising behavior in certain cases. See More

Top Pro

Support of semi-coroutines (generators)

Generators, also known as semicoroutines, are also a generalization of subroutines. Generators are primarily used to simplify the control of iteration behavior of a loop, the yield statement in a generator passes a value back to a parent routine. A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has a certain number of values. But instead of building and returning an array that contains all the wanted values, a generator returns them one at a time, this saves memory and allows the caller function to start processing the first few values immediately. See More

Top Pro

The Dart to JavaScript compiler generates high quality source code

Dart to Javascript compiler (dart2js) generates very high quality source code with very high optimization. The output code is also very readable and easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Crossplatform

Dart does not just compile to JavaScript, it also compiles to native code on mobile platforms like iOS and Android as demonstrated by flutter.io See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.1.0

IDE Support:Good quality IDE plugins for Jetbrains IDEs and Visual Studio Code

Standard:ECMA

See All Experiences

275 98

score 333 · Answer 6

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

Current stable version:1.3

See All Experiences

333 119

score 479 · Answer 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updates break existing code often

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

Top Pro

Growing community

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

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included. 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

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 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

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 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

Current stable version:0.19.1

GZipped size:23.2 kB

See All Experiences

479 170

score 408 · Answer 8

C#

Top Pro

.NET is a great toolbox

C# runs on top of the .NET framework, which provides many libraries containing classes used for common tasks such as connecting to the Internet, displaying a window or editing files. Unlike many other languages, you don't have to pick between a handful of libraries for every small task you want to do. See More

Top Con

Older versions lacks standard-library support for immutable data structures

Top Pro

Incredibly Well-Engineered Language

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential. See More

Top Con

Complex syntax

Too many syntactic constructs to learn before it becomes usable. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for Windows

On Windows, Visual Studio is the recommended C# IDE. It provides a very flexible GUI that you can rearrange the way you want and many useful features such as refactorings (rename a variable, extract some code into a method, ...) and code formatting (you can pick exactly how you want the code to be formatted). Visual Studio also highlights your errors when you compile, making your debug sessions more efficient since you don't have to run the code to see the mistakes. There's also a powerful debugger that allows you to execute the code step-by-step and even change what part of the code will be executed next. In addition to giving you all the line-by-line information you'll need in a hassle-free manner, Visual Studio has stuff you can click on in the errors window that will take you to the documentation for that error, saving you several minutes of web searching. In addition to all of this, Visual Studio has an intuitive, intelligent, and helpful graphical user interface designer that generates code for you (the best of WYSIWYG, in my opinion), which is helpful for new programmers. Being able to create a fantastic-looking UI with one's mouse and then optionally tweak with code helps make programming fun for beginner developers. Visual Studio also has the best code completion --Intellisense is every bit as intelligent as the name says it is. It, as well as VS's parameter hinting, is context-, type-, user-, and position-sensitive, and displays relevant completions in a perfectly convenient yet understandable order. This feature allows a new programmer to answer the questions "What does this do?" and "How do I use it?" right then and there rather than having to switch to a browser to read through extensive documentation. This allows the programmer to satisfy their curiosity before it is snuffed out by several minutes of struggling through exhaustive documentation. And for the more adventurous and text-ready developer, Microsoft does the best job of ensuring that everything, from interfaces and wildcard types down to Console.WriteLine("") and the + operator, is well-documented and easy to understand, with relevant and well-explained usage examples that manage to be bite-size yet complete, simple yet truly helpful. The reference site is easy to navigate, well-organized, clean and uncluttered, up-to-date, and fresh and enjoyable to look at, and every page is well-written with consideration for readers who are not C# experts yet want to read about changing the console background color. The best part? It's free! Visual C# Express contains all of the features described above, at zero cost. If you are a student, you can probably get Visual Studio Professional from your university, which also includes tools for unit testing and supports plugins. See More

Top Con

.NET is a mess

Continual drama with standards, updates, Microsoft, and being really cross-platform. See More

Top Pro

Supports some functional features

C# is primarily object-oriented, but it also supports some features typically found in functional languages such as lambdas, delegates and anonymous classes. Methods can be treated like any other object, and the Linq query system operates on monads with lazy evaluation (though it hides this with a lot of syntactic sugar). You don't need to use these features to code in C#, though, so you can start with OOP and then learn about them. See More

Top Con

Excessively class based OOP oriented

Limits users into overly using awkward paradigm and creating another kind of spaghetti code. See More

Top Pro

Great introduction to object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is the most widely-used paradigm. C# offers support for common OOP features such as classes, methods and fields, plus some features not found in competing languages like properties, events and static classes. C# code is much more readable thanks to the syntactic sugar it offers. You can truly concentrate on your code, not on the way it's implemented. See More

Top Con

A pale imitation of Java

C# is a Java-like language, but Microsoft failed to imitate Java's consistency. For instance, C# has types that cannot be passed by address (e.g. DateTime), forcing the developer to use ugly workarounds. See More

Top Pro

Best language for Windows programs

C# is clearly the best choice for Windows programs. The .NET framework contains everything you need to build great-looking apps, without having to learn the confusing Win32 API or download a ton of external libraries. C# can also be used to build Windows 8's "modern" apps. See More

Top Con

Too easy to write multithreading apps that are buggy

Many web frameworks or GUI libraries will push novice users to writing multithreaded code, which leads to frustrating race condition bugs. Other languages with multithreading push users towards safe constructs, like passing messages and immutable or synchronized containers. But in C# the data structures aren't synchronized by default, and it's too easy to just set a field and observe the result from another thread (until you compile with Release, and now you have a heisenbug). See More

Top Pro

Very high demand in the industry

C#'s been around for just the right amount of time, is regularly updated with useful additions, is versatile, easy to write & read, & has excellent tooling support. This means it is a top choice for many organizations & will remain so for the foreseeable future. See More

Top Con

Often-used products in most C# development environments get expensive

The majority of the C# development community uses Microsoft products which are not all free and open-source. As you get into the enterprise level of some of these products and subscriptions, the expense is multiple factors of 10 greater. While you can use a fully open-source and free C# environment, the community around that is much smaller. While this can be said for other languages as well, the majority of C# falls into the for-pay Microsoft realm. See More

Top Pro

Can mix high and low level programming

You can code at the high level without worrying about pointers and memory management, but if you so choose you can switch to lower level programming with direct memory management and pointer manipulation (though you need to compile to specifically allow this). See More

Top Con

Popularly used on Visual Studio (proprietary)

Most people learn and depend on Visual Studio (proprietary) to write C#. The result is people learn how to use an IDE and not the concepts or fundamentals of good programming. However, you don't need VS to develop in C#, all you need is the dotnet CLI and a text editor that supports OmniSharp like VSCodium, Vim and Emacs. See More

Top Pro

Awesome IDE for cross-platform development

Visual studio has embraced cross platform development over the past 3 years. With Visual Studio Code, you now have a light, and quick IDE variant available for free as well. See More

Top Con

Large Library and eco system makes it unsuitable for beginers

yes, all the information about the .net framework is in one place, but it is so extense that it introduces a steep learning curve for newcomers to the field of programming languages. See More

Top Pro

With ASP CORE a good language to learn

With CORE you are no longer just limited to Windows, so a language worth learning. See More

Top Pro

Supported on many platforms

C# can be used for Windows apps, Linux apps, OS X apps, Windows 8 "modern" apps, websites, games, iPhone apps, Android apps, Windows Phone apps, and more. If you want to create a cross-platform application, you can share most of the code and write one GUI for each platform. See More

Top Pro

.NET truly universal

With .NET core it is a truly universal programming language which support desktop apps (Windows), Mobile apps (Xamarin), Web Apps (ASP.Core MVC). Also is perfectly fit to serverless programming for micro services. Soon it will be also support Web assembly (Blazor). See More

Top Pro

Great language for Unity game engine

Unity provides a selection of programming languages depending on preference or knowledge - C#, JS, Boo and UnityScript. C# is arguably the most powerful with better syntax and stronger language structure. It allows using script files without attaching them to any game object (classes, methods inside unattached scripts that can be used at any time). There are more tutorials and information for C# than UnityScript and Visual Studio can be used to code for unity in C#. Additionally, learning C# allows using it outside of Unity as well unlike UnityScript. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IOS

License:MIT, Open Source

IDE Support:Visual Studio on Windows, JetBrains Rider, Visual Studio Code on other platforms

Standard:ECMA

See All Experiences

408 162

score 490 · Answer 9

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

Has built-in unittest module

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

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

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

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

Multi paradigm

Imperative, OOP, functional programming in one language. 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

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

Built-in Unicode support

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

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 or JavaScript interpreter

Current stable version:2.0.0

See All Specs

See All Experiences

490 195

score 49 · Answer 10

Ceylon

Top Pro

Try it out in the browser

It has a Web IDE: http://try.ceylon-lang.org/ with impressive demos: http://try.ceylon-lang.org/?gist=bd41b47f325b6d32514a so you can try it without installing anything, and see the JS generation / interop in action. See More

Top Con

Lack of physical or electronic books

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, popularity of the language which can't give much to the pockets of the author (however, Dart's unpopularity at start didn't prevent it to have a lot of printed material, but that's Google's child, we know). See More

Top Pro

Strong static typing, null safe and flexible, almost dynamic type system

The compiler prevents you from using a potentially null variable, unless you check it is not null. Ie. it forces you to check a potentially null value before using it. The type system is strict, but flexible, allowing union and intersection of types, covariant and contravariant types, reified types, etc. Type inference and union types allows a dynamic programming style, close of JS spirit. See More

Top Con

Currently has large runtime

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 browsing). Moreover, most servers compress such resource, and the numbers become respectively 234 KiB and 54 KiB, which is more reasonable... See More

Top Pro

Designed from the start to generate JavaScript

It brings type safety to JS, allowing to define interfaces to existing JS APIs, yet using the dynamic keyword for flexible calls in the JS ecosystem. See More

Top Pro

Excellent IDE support

Ceylon has reified generics, so it doesn't loose the type of collections at runtime. This makes autocompletion, debugging, etc. first-class. The Eclipse plugin makes it a full-fledged Ceylon IDE, and an IntelliJ IDEA plugin is in the works. See More

Top Pro

Great tutorial

Gavin King, main author of the language, has a great, clear technical writing style, making understandable difficult concepts like variance or sound type system. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

The language specification is very complete and up to date; also, the language module is very well documented. See More

Top Pro

Javascript interoperability

Ceylon has special language-level support for interoperation with dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, and its module system even interoperates with npm. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn even if you don't have prior programming experience

Ceylon is indeed fairly easy and readable. Of course those ones who know OOP and a bit of functional programming concepts will feel almost at home right from the start. See More

Top Pro

Generate HTML

HTML generation is supported right in the SDK. See More

Top Pro

Same code in backend and frontend

If you don't use platform-specific features, you can reuse the same code in your backend server (be it in Java or JavaScript) and in your client-side browser code, for example for storing data, validating input etc. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.3.2

See All Experiences

49 25

score 331 · Answer 11

TypeScript

Top Pro

Optional static typing

Typescript has optional static typing with support for interfaces and generics, and intelligent type inference. It makes refactoring large codebases a breeze, and provides many more safeguards for creating stable code. See More

Top Con

Too similar to Javascript

Presents some advantages compared to Javascript, but because it is designed to be a superset of Javascript, it means all the bad parts of Javascript are still present. See More

Top Pro

Strong typed language

Lot of benefits of it, you can read this. See More

Top Con

Type checking not enforced by default

You have to use compiler flags to make sure it catches flaws like usage of implicit any, etc. See More

Top Pro

Strict superset of Javascript

Every existing Javascript program is already a valid TypeScript program giving it the best support for existing libraries, which is particularly useful if you need to integrate with an existing Javascript code base. See More

Top Con

Type inference coverage is incomplete

The default type when declaring and using a variable is any. For example, the following should break but does not: function add(a:number) { return a + 1 } function addAB(a, b) {return add(a) + b} addAB("this should break but doesn't :(", 100) In order to avoid this, you have to declare type signatures for every variable or parameter or set the flag --noImplicityAny when running the compiler. See More

Top Pro

First party Visual Studio support

As a Microsoft developed project, it has first party Visual Studio support that's on par with its C# support with features like syntax sensitive statement completion. See More

Top Con

Requires "this" for field access

Even in cases were there is no ambiguity, you still have to use "this.fieldName" instead of just "fieldName". See More

Top Pro

Has a repository of high quality TypeScript type definitions for popular libraries

There are many ready to use and high quality TypeScript definitions for popular libraries including jquery, angular, bootstrap, d3, lodash and many-many more. See More

Top Con

Syntax is too verbose

Top Pro

Adds support for object-oriented programming

Typescript enables familiar object-oriented programming patterns: classes, inheritance, public/private methods and properties, et cetera. See More

Top Con

No support for dead code elimination

Typescript compiler does not remove dead code from generated file(s), you have to use external tools to remove unused code after compilation. This is harder to achieve, because Typescript compiler eliminated all type information. See More

Top Pro

Polyfill for ES6 fat-arrow syntax

Typescript implements the fat arrow syntax, which always maintains the current context for this and is a shorter/more convenient syntax than traditional function definition. See More

Top Con

No support for conditional compilation

There is no clean way to have debug and release builds compiled from the same source, where the release version removes all debugging tools and outputs from the generated file(s). See More

Top Pro

Great support for React, integrated typed JSX parsing

Strongly typed react components, so UI "templating" automatically gains type safety. See More

Top Con

Awful error messages

Comparing to Elm or Rust for example, TypeScript's error messages won't say you very much. For example if you change method of interface which your class implements it won't say your class have incorrect implementation. Instead it'll show error in usage of instances of class. In some cases it can spoil hours of your work trying to figure out why your parameters are incorrect. See More

Top Pro

Great support for editors (Sublime, Code, Vim, IntelliJ...)

Top Con

Technical debt

As consequence of not enforcing type checking. See More

Top Pro

Works well with existing Javascript code

Both can call Javascript code and be called by Javascript code. Making transitioning to the language very easy. See More

Top Con

Far less typed libraries than Dart (and TSD are never up to date)

Just compare this and this. Typescript => 930 Dart => 2060 See More

Top Pro

Compiles to very native looking code

Compiles to simple looking Javascript making it easy to understand what is happening and learn the language (if you already know Javascript). See More

Top Con

No Java-like package structure

If you prefer a Java-like approach of partitioning your code into different packages, the module system of typescript will confuse you. See More

Top Pro

Built and supported by Microsoft

Being built by Microsoft, TypeScript is much more likely than most other similar open-source projects to receive continued long-term support, good documentation, and a steady stream of development. See More

Top Con

Small community

Top Pro

Ability to do functional programming

Top Con

No option to declare that a function throws errors

Top Pro

Clear roadmap

TypeScript has a clear and defined roadmap with rapid and constant releases. See More

Top Pro

Low number of logical errors brought in by built-in type annotations

TypeScript's built-in type signatures allow developers to fully document interfaces and make sure that they will be correctly compiled. Therefore, cutting down on logical errors. See More

Top Pro

Works well with Angular 2

Angular 2 is built using TypeScript and applications built using it can make use of that (or not). See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.7

IDE Support:Very good

See All Experiences

331 144

score 503 · Answer 12

C

Top Pro

Understanding of computers

Learning C forces you to grapple with the low-level workings of your computer (memory management, pointers, etc.) in ways that the other languages abstract away. Without an understanding of these low-level aspects of computer programming you will be limited if you try to develop an application that needs to run in a memory or performance constrained environment. Other languages like Python can obscure a lot of details, so your foundation may be weaker. See More

Top Con

Languages is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors

Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. These serve to frustrate novice programmers when they could be learning other concepts. See More

Top Pro

Helps with learning other languages later

A lot of languages used in the industry have a C-like syntax (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP) and starting with C will help new developers to be familiar with it's syntax and by extensions with the syntax of many popular languages. See More

Top Con

Requires memory management

Learning programming is already hard enough when you don't have to worry about memory leaks. See More

Top Pro

Industry standard

C is the industry standard programming language, moreover, it is the most popular programming language to use. C is the language used for most Windows, UNIX and Mac operating systems. See More

Top Con

Completely lacks type safety

The C standard library is not type safe, and the language itself does not promote type safety built into the language, which leads to error-proneness of the language. If anything, it would be recommended that those interested in C to instead put their time in D, which actually includes a complete copy of the C standard library rewritten to be fully type safe. See More

Top Pro

Portable

C is portable between most hardware. Generally a C compiler is made for any new architecture, and already exists for existing architectures. C is portable between all operating systems (Windows, UNIX, Mac, etc.) and only needs a program to be recompiled to work. This allows anyone on any operating system to learn about the language and not be held back by intricacies of their operating system. With this said, C's portability these days is not quite what it used to be. Much of said portability relies on the POSIX standard in particular, and as time passes, the compliance of a given system with that standard is becoming less certain; especially in the case of Linux. Most things will still be portable (or at least emulatable) between Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD for example; but you will at times need to make use of platform-specific support libraries and APIs as well. See More

Top Con

C will require you to learn concepts too advanced for most beginners

While other programmers will learn algorithms and structures and will do magic tricks and awesome applications, you will learn trash info that you should know maybe after 5-7 years experience in software development, not earlier. It's like going the first time as a seven year old kid to first school class, and your teacher tells you to learn you about Discrete Math, without basic math and how to do 2x2. If you wish to be a really good programmer, C for sure will be in your portfolio, but not as a first language, and this programming language is used only for very hard and very limited tools which require a lot of professional skills from the programmer. See More

Top Pro

Must-have

Capability to program in C is greatly appreciated in developers, creates an image of competency, and many programmers will learn it at some point in their careers. See More

Top Con

Does not support modules; header file annoyances

Header files are a poor man's implementation of modules. Modern programming languages make use of modules which eliminate the need for C includes and header files and the many issues caused by them, such as the complete lack of dependency checking. Header files often contain even more include statements that point to other header files which also point to even more which drastically increases compile time. Modules only have to be compiled once, and when importing those modules into your software project, you only have to pull in the module that you are using, which is often times already precompiled. This way, the compiler knows exactly what it needs before beginning to compile your project and can automatically compile the few dependencies it needs in advance rather than recursively compiling every header file it runs across as in C. See More

Top Pro

Low level of abstraction

While higher level languages languages like Java and Python provide possibilities to be "more expressive" per line of code, it's much more convenient to start with "less efficient" (get me right) language, in order to get initial concepts of how things behave at lower level. Actually C is a good starting point moving to both higher and lower levels of abstraction, the good example here would be learning C before Assembler, as for general use the Assembler quite hard to understand due to low level of its abstraction (like getting the understanding on how loops work in C before trying to implement them on Assembler). See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

While the language compliments knowledge of computer components very well, and gives a deeper understanding, it is also quite difficult to learn, and to use correctly, especially without aforementioned knowledge. See More

Top Pro

More control over the code

Top Con

Low-level

Depending on the purpose this can be either a pro or a con. If the task is to learn how to program, low-level of C will impend learning important concepts. Furthermore, C is rather limited in ways of building abstractions. "Low-levelness" of C can be a pro feature in learning system programming. See More

Top Pro

The king of languages, imitated, extended but never equalled

Made of a small set of keywords and rules, only your imagination is the limit. Above all, when it comes to 'pro' programming, C is the only one to rely on. See More

Top Con

Other languages can do it easier or better

There are languages like Rust, Object Pascal, D, Golang, Vlang, Odin, Zig, Jai, etc... that can be used instead. The other languages are easier to understand, use, and/or about as fast. See More

Top Pro

Teaches good practices

Writing in C will require you to understand how things are done. C implies using and understanding the fundamentals. Learning a higher-level language after is much easier. See More

Top Con

Compiles procedurally rather than intelligently

In the same manner that C recursively compiles header files ad infinitum without any sort of dependency checking, C source code is also compiled in the same manner. If you attempt to call a function before it is declared, the compiler will fail because the function was not compiled before it was caled. See More

Top Pro

Portable between CPU architectures

C was designed to be independent of any particular machine architecture, and so with a little care, it is easy to write "portable" programs (see here). By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language like operating systems or small embedded systems. See More

Top Con

Lack of support for first class strings

C does not support the string type, nor does it support UTF-8 strings that modern languages are employing today. Instead of strings, C makes use of the *char type which is a pointer to a character array. See More

Top Pro

C is simple with lesser rules than any other language

C is standardized and it is the go-to language when you have to speed things up. See More

Top Con

Arrays are not first class objects

When an array is passed to a function, it is converted to a pointer, even though the prototype confusingly says it's an array. When this conversion happens, all array type information gets lost. C arrays also cannot not be resized, which means that even simple aggregates like a stack are complicated to implement. C arrays also cannot be bounds checked, because they don't know what the array bounds are. See More

Top Pro

Ubiquitous

There is a C compiler available for probably every computer system in existence today. See More

Top Con

Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety

Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C compiler is free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably avoid undefined cases in C, so how can beginners be expected to do so? C allows for non-type safe operations such as logic errors, wild pointers, buffer overflow, etc. UB and type safety issues create a large number of bugs and security vulnerabilities. See More

Top Pro

Easy to drop down to assembly

Sometimes you really need to program directly in assembly. C’s ABI and common compiler extensions make this a piece of cake. See More

Top Con

The need for C developers in the current market is very low, and trending downward

Older languages, like C, are no longer in their hay day. Even if you do learn it as your first language, you are only setting yourself up to need to learn another language in the long run. If you want a skill that you can not only learn from, but also potentially build a career on, C should not be your first choice. See More

Top Pro

If you can't grok C you should not be a professional programmer

It sets an early bar that if you can't hurdle you might as well do something other than programming and not waste any more of your time. See More

Top Con

Isn't truly portable or cross platform

The C programming language is not portable to other operating systems, and even different compilers, because the C language does not provide any reference cross platform libraries or compilers. Different platforms and compilers provide their own implementation of the C standard library which may not be compatible with the implementation in another compiler or platform. Without cross platform libraries and tools, one cannot state that C is portable. This is in stark contrast to modern programming languages that provide their own cross platform libraries and compilers, such as D, Go and Rust. See More

Top Pro

Basic concepts can be applied to accelerate learning any other language

You can easily pivot knowledge learned here and apply it to almost every other language. See More

Top Con

Only offers basic support for source code split into multiple files

Modern programming languages are capable of compiling split source code files by concatenating them together efficiently at compile time before compiling them. However, C requires the developer to resort to messing with header files and makefiles to get similar functionality. See More

Top Pro

Foundational, difficult but important

Learning C will teach valuable skills and transferrable understanding of computing. While learning a scripting language may be easier, students will not understand system constraints and performance problems, nor what features like garbage collection are actually doing in other languages. See More

Top Con

C structs are very weak and outdated

C structs lack a lot of modern capabilities that are vital in programming languages of today, such as assigning member functions to structs to give them object-oriented capabilities, constructs, deconstructors and RAII. Great care must be used when using structs in C to prevent memory leaks and ridiculously slow structs. See More

Top Pro

Low level langauge

Top Con

Includes require obscene resources to compile

All the modern languages have resulted in ditching the ancient deprecated model of #include statements and have instead adopted the superior model of modules. When compiling software written in C, the programmer is forced to also compile X headers which contain Y headers which contain Z headers and so forth -- drastically increasing the number of lines that need to be compiled. In order to compile something as simple as "Hello, World", for example, 18K lines of code needs to be compiled. This can be very taxing on RAM and CPU resources, causing compile times to quickly absorb a large portion of the programming process. See More

Top Con

Heavily outdated programming concepts

C lacks a large majority of programming concepts that modern languages make use of today. The existing functionality of C makes use of outdated and deprecated methodologies which can be of great annoyance to the modern day programmer. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

Standard:ISO/IEC 9899:2011/Cor 1:2012 or C11

Typing discipline:static

Paradigm:imperative

See All Specs

See All Experiences

503 215

score 130 · Answer 13

CoffeeScript

Top Pro

Compiles to readable Javascript

With CoffeeScript, there's never really a question of what is going on. If you're worried that something went wrong in the compilation process, the output is very human readable and mostly 1 to 1 with the CoffeeScript code, making debugging easier as the code that is being executed by the interpreter can be double checked. See More

Top Con

Terse syntax can lead to ambiguity

It can sometimes be hard to be sure of what CoffeeScript will compile down to because of the optional parentheses and significant white spacing. Over multiple lines the same statement can be written in many different ways, and it's not always clear what the intended interpretation is. For example: foo bar and hello world can compile to either: foo(bar) && hello(world) foo(bar && hello(world)) See More

Top Pro

Widely used

CoffeeScript is the most popular of the compile to Javascript languages, so long term support is much less of a worry than with others. It also means there are many plugins and tools for integrating it into many different build systems, giving it it nearly universal support. See More

Top Con

Initializing a variable and assigning it are essentially the same thing

Because of how variables are initialized and reassigned in CoffeeScript, it becomes very easy to accidentally overwrite a variable as the codebase increases. As complexity increases, the only way to safely create a variable is by pressing Ctrl + F and by examining the current file to ensure that there's no conflict. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight syntax

Javascript is a very verbose language so CoffeeScript's goal is to lighten it to make it less tedious. Various design choices are built around making CoffeeScript more terse with things like optional parenthesis in function calls, cleaner function declarations, no curly braces, and significant white space. Because Javascript can get pretty deeply nested at times, having a lightweight syntax helps with readability. The result is a language with a minimalistic syntax with lots of syntax sugar. See More

Top Con

Last expression is returned by default

While this is a pro for small functions, it requires self-discipline to check if unnecessary overheads are introduced: eat_full = -> for food in fridge break if full cook food if food.requires_cooking() eat food This will return array of eat function results. Can be fixed by adding empty return at the end. See More

Top Pro

It's just JavaScript

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly from CoffeeScript (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript runtime, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript. See More

Top Pro

Syntax for humans, not compilers.

CoffeeScript adds syntax that is not only more terse than javascript, smoothing over the rough edges, but also enforces a more human readable syntax to the point where a non-programmer can understand some logic. Many programmers that are not use to coffeescripts syntax will find it foreign if they don't read the single page API, but generally it is quick to understand and although self documenting code is a myth coffeescript is definitely very close. if hungry then eat food for food in fridge when food isnt poison and it isnt bedtime Seems a lot more concise and comprehensible to many programmers and most others than the alternative syntax: var food, i, len; if (hungry) { for (i = 0, len = fridge.length; i < len; i++) { food = fridge[i]; if (food !== poison && it !== bedtime) { eat(food); } } } See More

Top Pro

Function syntax is great for callbacks

Passing functions as callbacks is central to how Javascript is written, but the default syntax for functions is very verbose and hard to read. Various CoffeeScript syntax decisions help with ease of writing and reading functions. The most obvious change is that the function keyword is changed from function to ->. Writing out the word function is very clunky especially when you need to use multiple nested functions. One of the more opinionated choices of CoffeeScript is the use of significant whitespace, and optional parens around function arguments. While this can be used poorly, it can also be used to great effect with nested functions. For example, a function that takes an object that defines anonymous functions will end in a mess of parens and curly braces: asyncAction({ success: function(data){ /* handle data */ }, error: function(error){ /* handle errors */ } }); In CoffeeScript you could rewrite this as: asyncAction success: (data) -> /* handle data */ fail: (error) -> /* handle errors */ Other helpful features are automatic returning of the last statement to make short anonymous functions easier so (a, b) -> a+b would replace function (a, b) { return a+b; }, as well as binding functions to the current context object with =>. See More

Top Pro

Splats

Because Javascript functions can take variable amounts of parameters, it is helpful to be able to use splats to extract an array of arguments in a function. For example, if you have a function like: (a, b, rest...) ->any amount of parameters sent to the function after a, b will be stored in an array in the variable rest. You can also put splats at the start or middle of the arguments list, such as (a, middle..., b) ->. When calling a function you can use a splat to apply an array as arguments as well. See More

Top Pro

Everything is an expression

Even for loops and if statements. For example, to get mapped array, you don't have to use any Array methods, just the language features: food = ( stuff for stuff in fridge when stuff.isEatable() ) See More

Top Pro

Familiar to Ruby programmers

CoffeeScript was created by a Ruby programmer and a number of syntax features are modelled on Ruby equivalents, so will be familiar to Ruby programmers. For example, implicit returns, i.e. the last variable of each function is implicitly returned, so "return" keyword need not be present. See More

Top Pro

Extremely easy to document with literate coffeescript

Skip the documentation build, just write documentation with literate CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript has a literate mode which let's you use markdown (used by almost everything, such as reddit, github, stack exchange, etc) with code indented how you would normally in markdown and simply enables you to run the code. This enables you to quickly write FORMATTED, custom documentation that's easily displayed with no build step for the documentation. See More

Top Pro

Source maps allow you to debug code in CoffeeScript

With source maps, you can get the proper location of where an error occurred directly in precompiled code, making it easier to debug without the tedious step of translating the compiled code back to the original code in your head. See More

Top Pro

Significant whitespace

Having indention-based code blocks is particularly helpful in JavaScript because of its functional callback based nature. In JavaScript you find yourself writing functions within object and passing functions to functions. You can find statements ending with a confusing melange of braces like )}})}). With significant whitespace, most of the needs for braces go away. See More

Top Pro

Default choice for Ruby on Rails

Top Pro

Maintainable code

Easy to read and easy to work with structures like list. See More

Specs

License:MIT

Current stable version:2.3.2

See All Experiences

130 77

score 226 · Answer 14

C++

Top Con

Huge language gets in the way of learning

C++ is such an atrociously over-complicated language that its learning curve may get in the way of learning fundamentals. Learning C++ well is a ten-year project, and even experts are frequently surprised by the language. See More

Top Pro

Huge language supports most everything

C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++ See More

Top Con

Undefined behavior

Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C++ standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C++ compiler writers are free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably avoid undefined cases in C++, so how can beginners be expected to do so? See More

Top Pro

Powerful memory management

Allows puting large arrays on the "heap" to avoid "stack overflow". See More

Top Con

Tough to learn as the first language

Many of the concepts are hard to grasp if you have no prior programming experience. See More

Top Pro

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

Module system is not great

C++ uses the #include mechanism provided by C. Which unfortunately is a poor way of accessing the API of a library. Some of the reasons why the module system is weak are: Compile time scalability: The compiler must preprocess every header included in a file, and every header included in those headers. This process must be repeated for every translation unit in the program. As can be imagined, this doesn't scale very well. For each header added you are increasing the compilation time exponentially. Fragile: modules included are treated as textual imports by the compiler. This causes all sorts of problems since they are subject to any macro definitions in the time of the inclusion. If any of these macro definitions collide with a name in the library it can break the library API . See More

Top Pro

Excellent compiler optimization

Both open source compilers (such as Clang and GCC), and proprietary ones (like Intel's and Microsoft's) are very good at analyzing program flow and program optimization. This is mostly due to the widespread usage of C/C++ applications running everything from mobile/desktop/server Operating Systems, to search engines and webserver software, and the demand for performance. See More

Top Con

C++ succombs under its own weight

The years of cramped backward compatibility start to show in the syntax, complexity and very top-heavy language structures. Trying to keep up with far more elegant languages like C# doesn't do C++ any good either, because the committee always seems to be able to mess it up. After numerous years, still no modules... you must be kidding! See More

Top Pro

Teaches problem solving

The great STL is the most powerful Data Structure and Algorithms Library. It would benefit you very much in problem solving, your main main way to love programming. The code is much compact compared to Java and C#. No unnecessary classes are in your way; yet when you need classes they are available unlike C. The code runs very fast. See More

Top Con

Painfully slow compilation

Beginners need fast feedback See More

Top Pro

Teaches low-level programming, but doesn't have as many pitfalls as C

Teaches data types, low-level program flow and the so common C-style syntax while not being as much of a pain as C itself. See More

Top Con

Duplicates C features in incompatible ways

Arrays, strings, pointers, etc. have both C and C++ versions. Sometimes the C++ versions are worse. This is more useless trivia beginners have to sort through. See More

Top Pro

STD is often updated

The functionalities keep growing throughout the years. C++11 gave us a soft type of garbage collecting with the smart pointers. See More

Top Con

Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety

Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. C++ allows for non-type safe operations such as logic errors, wild pointers, buffer overflow, etc. UB and type safety issues create a large number of bugs and security vulnerabilities. See More

Top Pro

C code can be used in C++ code

Most C code will work as C++. See More

Top Con

No two programmers can agree on which 10% subset of C++ to use

C++ is such a huge and complicated language, that programmers have to learn a disciplined subset of it to reliably get anything done. The problem is, no-one can agree on which subset to use and they can't understand each other. See More

Top Pro

Faster execution of the same algorithms

Because C++ (and its precursor C) are "lower level" than a lot of popular programming languages they are also faster at executing code than Java or C# which require VMs and garbage collection threads. See More

Top Con

Retains nearly all bad habits of C

Top Pro

Universal, portable, best complexity/efficiency trade-off

Top Con

No reflection

C++ objects are frustratingly opaque. This makes debugging especially difficult, something beginners have to do a lot. See More

Top Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

Top Con

Memory leaks and segmentation faults

Because C and C++ allow the user direct access to memory and don't provide garbage collection threads, there is a probability that a program may have a "memory leak", which occurs when something a programmer allocated in the heap is not deallocated properly. Also, attempting to dereference memory protected by the operating system causes a segmentation fault and kills the program. See More

Top Pro

Has lots of library

C++ is mature and everything has standardized library. See More

Top Con

Arcane binding rules

Top Con

Incomprehensible operator overloading resoution

Top Con

After all these years of trying, still no decent string library.

Although you have several ways to handle strings, all of them are messy and error-prone, giving birth to many crashes and memory corruptions in the field. It's one of the worst languages ever, if you have to do strings. See More

Top Con

Bugs easily corrupt the memory you need to find them

You can usually get a core dump, but often the call stack gets completely overwritten. Compilers are not even consistent in how they map the binary objects to code. See More

Top Con

No way to locate definitions

No modules, just files, and no way to tell where anything came from. See More

Top Con

Complicated types

Top Con

Standard library missing important features

Top Con

Exceptions incompatible with C++ manual memory management

Specs

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

See All Experiences

226 142

score 222 · Answer 15

PHP

Top Pro

One of the most common languages

According to the 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (26,086 people surveyed), PHP was the 5th most popular/used language at 29.7%. See More

Top Con

Poorly designed language

Despite its widespread use, PHP is generally looked upon poorly from a design point of view. The consistency of function names and function argument order, lazily and borderline non-functional implementation of object oriented programming, can only receive requests via POST methods, slow version adoption (the PHP you learn right now may not work on every webserver you'll work on), and a focus on "hacking things together" rather than "doing it right". These are all very common complaints when it comes to working with PHP. While not a bad language to learn, PHP is not at all a good language to learn first, as it will probably teach bad habits. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials online

Top Con

Immense catalog of insecure frameworks

The most serious security problems in websites on the web today are almost universally found in popular PHP frameworks, CMS platforms, libraries and code samples, almost all stemming from poor language design, bad tutorials and awful resources. See More

Top Pro

Used by most common CMS platforms

Many clients are looking for an easy-to-update web site that's flexible and free. Drupal and Wordpress fill those needs very well. See More

Top Con

After python, probably one of the worst languages ever

Top Pro

Most prominent language for web applications

Part of the de facto standard web application stack. See More

Top Con

Poorly designed language, awful syntax & luckily on the decline

Nobody in their right mind is using PHP for new software, if you decide to learn it as your first language you'll be stuck working in teams with old developers who have had no interest in the computer programming field since they landed their first job while maintaining some 2000 era archaic website codebase. See More

Top Pro

Great third-party package manager

PHP standard library is somewhat subpar, but if you need plugins, language features, composer has them all( you can even puzzle together a custom framework from composer). See More

Top Con

Most tutorials are out of date

A lot of very bad tutorials are still widely circulated among beginners, and these tutorials teach very poor programming practices. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Since 7.x was released, PHP has become a pretty fast language. See More

Top Con

Most resources are poorly-written

Few resources exemplify the "correct" or secure use of features. See More

Top Pro

Lots of PHP frameworks available which help with development

PHP people love frameworks, and with frameworks such as Laravel, you can build a web app or API really fast (Facades, ORMs, scaffolding etc.) See More

Top Con

Interpreter being too permissive

If you forget the dollar sign, the variable name will be converted to a string. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Specs

Price:Open Source (free)

Current stable version:8.0

See All Experiences

222 152

score 7 · Answer 16

Lobster

Top Pro

Compile time reference counting

Unlike Rust doesn't make the programmer jump through hoops, mainly automatic. Does an analysis similar to the Rust borrow checker to infer lifetimes, but makes life easier on the programmer. See More

Top Con

Small community

Lead doesn't appear to be so ambitious or has a vision to push making more popular. See More

Top Pro

Python-esque syntax

There's an audience who loves that. See More

Top Con

Compile time reference counting not 100%

Around 5% of time, need to escape to runtime reference counting. Working to get the percentage as low as possible. See More

Top Pro

WebAssembly backend

More options for users. See More

Top Con

Lobster not yet totally written in Lobster

Core written in C++. Plans to change that, but has been a long time. See More

Top Pro

Inline structs

Structs are allocated in their parent, and come at zero overhead. See More

Top Con

Python-like syntax, but different use case and domain

Not Python compatible and often significantly different in purpose and use cases. See More

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

Better than Rust. No sadism. See More

Top Pro

Type inference algorithm

Just works. Goes further than most languages in terms of allowing code without types. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS

License:Apache v2

Developer:Wouter van Oortmerssen

Current stable version:v2023

See All Specs

See All Experiences

7 0

score 5 · Answer 17

Mint

Top Pro

Writen in Crystal (Language)

Crystal is one of the best and elegant languages. See More

Top Pro

Constructs for synchronous and asynchronous computations

Top Pro

Easy to learn and write

Everything is an expression. See More

Top Pro

HTML and CSS integration

HTML can be written with minimal differences. Scoped .CSS can be written for elements in components. See More

Top Pro

Good error support

200+ unique error messages to help you on the way. See More

Top Pro

Everything is typed

Everything is typed using a simple type system See More

Top Pro

Dead code elimination

Only used parts of the code compiles into the final bundle. See More

Top Pro

Built-in formatter

Mint has a built-in formatter to format your code, it can run standalone or with the development server. See More

Top Pro

Batteries included

Mint contains everything you need to build the frontend of web applications from styling to data storage through HTTP requests to testing. See More

Top Pro

Integrated testing

Testing is part of the language and there is a test runner built in which runs tests in the browser. See More

Specs

Platforms:Mac Linux Web

Price:Open Source

Current stable version:0.5.0

Site:https://www.mint-lang.com

See All Experiences

5 0

score 11 · Answer 18

Hy

Top Pro

Python interop

Hy compiles to Python's abstract syntax trees. Python can import Hy modules, and Hy can import Python modules. See More

Top Pro

Easier to read

Distinguished between arrays (or vectors) and function calls by using [] and (), respectively. See More

Top Pro

Copyfree and open source

Uses the MIT (expat) license. See More

11 1

score 10 · Answer 19

ATS

Top Pro

Built-in formal specification

ATS has a theorem-proving type system powerful enough to prove that its functions meet their specifications. This happens at compile time with no performance impact at runtime. This can be used to prove that an ATS program doesn't have bugs commonly found in C++ programs, like "this function never leaks memory" or "this program never attempts to divide by zero" or "this buffer never overflows" or to verify pointer arithmetic, etc. See More

Top Con

No Windows version

But it does run on Cygwin. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source compiler

The compiler (ATS/Postiats) is GPLv3. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming

The syntax is ML-like with the usual functional language features like pattern matching and tail-call optimization. See More

Top Pro

High-performance systems language

ATS works as a low-level systems language. ATS programs have performance and footprint comparable to programs written in C/C++. See More

Top Pro

Good module system

Similar to Modula-3. This makes ATS a viable choice even for large-scale projects. See More

Top Pro

Safe concurrency

ATS can prove its concurrent programs have no deadlocks or race conditions. See More

See All Experiences

10 1

score 82 · Answer 20

Reason ML

Top Pro

Uses the excellent Bucklescript Ocaml to Javascript transpiler

Top Con

A standard async syntax is pending

Async syntax is not standard across native/js projects and in both cases a bit awkward for non-ocaml devs. Currently this is reasonml most voted issue in their GitHub repo so hopefully, there's news soon. See More

Top Pro

Superior type inference

Ocaml type inference is so smart that you never have to repeat yourself and keep code very clean, type errors also are very pleasant. See More

Top Con

Ecosystem is a mess

A wonderful language, but a user is required to use multiple different package managers for many things (esy, bsb, npm). Some standard templates from bsb (e.g. react-starter) are not installable out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Aims to make the transition from Javascript easier

Despite being a completely different language Javascript programmer will find that the syntax of ReasonML has many familiarities with Javascript. See More

Top Pro

Uses established compiler technology from Ocaml with a tweaked syntax that leans more towards Javascript

Top Pro

Removes JavaScript "bad parts" but sticks to it's design philosophy

unlike other js-targetting languages that are thought as a way to have a language that pleases community X run in a browser, reason is really designed with JavaScript community in mind. it removes the bad parts but keeps its syntax and its best design principles (from Scheme): simplicity, minimalism, and functions as building block. See More

Top Pro

Immutability with escape hatches

reason includes true immutability, but it has escape hatches to let you use mutations in exceptional cases. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to JavaScript or assembly (ocaml)

The same reasonml code can compile to js (eg. run on browsers or node.js, use any lib in npm), or compile to assembly thru ocaml (unless of course you load js externals), running on any device, with C-comparable (or better) performance. See More

Top Pro

JSX syntax natively supported

Reason was created by the creator of react, for developers already using JSX to template web or native UIs this results very familiar. See More

Specs

Version:3.6.0

See All Experiences

82 7