What are the best general-purpose programming languages?

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29 Options Considered

Best general-purpose programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Site
81 D	FREE	2.101.2	https://dlang.org/
74 Python	Free	3.9.1	-
-- Free Pascal	Free	-	-
-- V	Free	-	vlang.io, https://github.com/vlang
-- Guile	-	3.0.0	-

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score 35 · Answer 1

D

Top Pro

Very fast compilation

D is usually up to 10 times faster than C++. Having a language that compiles this fast means that you are free to write highly optimized code because of the relatively low cost of experimentation. See More

Top Con

Lack of vision

D is community-driven and lacks the support of any large corporation. While this increases the amount of talent and engineering abilities of the people working on D, it also brings a severe lack of charisma, leadership and vision. See More

EnchantingBebinn's Experience

Odd and confusing language that fails at being easier or giving enough reasons to use instead of C/C++ or something else new. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.101.2

Site:https://dlang.org/

Latest beta version:2.102.0-rc.1

Top Pro

Very flexible template and meta-programming

Top Con

Poor adoption even after many years of existence

There's a widely accepted perception of D as a language that has been poorly adopted. Since adoption is driven by perception this becomes a fact. So managers and engineers start becoming nervous in adopting a language that has such a perception among the community and that has been so unsuccessful for so long. See More

ResourcefulShala's Experience

Useful language, that is here today and ready. Great alternative to C or C++. See More

Top Pro

It's a state-of-art evolution of C

Top Con

All the downsides of garbage collection without any of its benefits

When D decided to implement garbage collection it instantly alienated a large community of developers (C and C++ programmers). For them, the official policy has been: "Don't want garbage collection? Use D with RAII or manual management style!". While true, it's also absolutely pointless because there's little to none support for alternate memory management styles in the standard library, which means that a new user will have to start with a language that is stripped down of the core infrastructure. On the other hand, for those people who want to use garbage collection, the implementation of it is lackluster. See More

Rempas's Experience

I would not recommend D if it's to be used with its runtime and built-in library (phobos). However, when's its used with the "betterC" compiler switch, the language really shines and its the best choice we have yet! The language can be like C but with more features! Something like C++ but less annoying to deal with! D can interpolate on only with C libraries but also with C++ ones so you'll be able to use your favorite libraries. On top of that, the team works to make able importing C preprocessed files and compile them (by making a C compiler inside the D one). This feature is called "importC" and it allows users to import header files and not have to create the binding themselves. I recommend D with "betterC" and until my own language is out, D is our best choice yet! See More

Top Pro

Compile-time Function Execution

Top Con

Failed at becoming alternative to C or C++

Almost as confused and complicated as C++, but without the popularity and widespread corporate usage. Also failed at becoming a good cross-platform GUI application development language like Object Pascal. Many missed past opportunities, and now newer languages are better alternatives. See More

HonorableProserpina's Experience

Unit testing as part of the language. Nice Lambda syntax See More

Top Pro

Doesn't force you to deal with memory management

When you're just starting out, dealing with manual memory management and its bugs is a huge pain! D is garbage collected by default, which removes a huge class of things that could go wrong. And later on, if you decide you don't want or need the GC, you can turn it off. See More

Top Con

Divisively went the garbage collection route

Lack of understanding about users and supporters needs. Lack of direction to help language find its niche and wider acceptance. See More

Top Pro

Unit testing built-in

D provides unittest blocks to insert code that verifies functions preform their expected behavior and document edge cases. Since these are enabled with a compiler switch, there is no need to teach new programmers how to install new libraries and import modules, instead training on test driven design can start from the very first function. See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with C and C++

D practically has the same memory structure as C and C++; all D does it build a structure around that. The entire C standard library is accessible at no cost (syntactic or speed) and it's being worked on allowing the same for the C++ standard library. See More

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

Top Pro

Has an improved C subset

With few exceptions, D will either compile C code to work exactly as when compiled as C, or it won't compile - it won't quietly change the semantics of C code and give unexpected results. This means that D contains an improved C, as it fails compilation where type safety is missing in C. This allows learning the same machine operations available in C and other low-level languages. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read and understand code

Top Pro

Supports calling functions from types in an object-oriented manner

if (exists(file)) {} may be written as if (file.exists) {}. writeln(file); may be written as file.writeln(); isDivisibleBy(10, 2); may be written as 10.isDivisibleBy(2); writeln(isEven(add(5, 5))); may be written as 5.add(5).isEven().writeln(); See More

Top Pro

Static with type inference

For a new user adding types can feel tedious, and takes focus off the meaning of the code, but they are also important for checking logic. D provides static types, and a good system to infer types, so types are checked when calling functions, but do not need to be specified everywhere, making it feel more dynamic. See More

Top Pro

Provides a powerful data structure on top of C's arrays called slices

D provides a structure that builds on C's arrays called slices. A slice is a segment of an array that tracks the pointer and the length of the segment. Slices are extremely powerful because they combine the protection of knowing the length of the data with the garbage collector that manages the memory backing that data, thus avoiding most memory corruption issues. See More

Top Pro

You don't need to explicitly compile file to run - you can do `rdmd <your-file>.d` and will implicitly compile and run for you

From the site. The rdmd is a companion to the dmd compiler that simplifies the typical edit-compile-link-run or edit-make-run cycle to a rapid edit-run cycle. See More

Top Pro

Industrial quality

Top Pro

Uniform Function Call Syntax (UFCS) which allows for elegant function chaining

Top Pro

Designed for concurrency and parallelism

Supports first-class functionality for both concurrency and parallelism, offered as part of the standard library. See More

Top Pro

Provable purity and immutability

The compiler can check that functions don't have side effects, extremely important for functional programming in concurrent scenarios, and can check immutability. Therefore, the compiler will prove that your programs are functionally pure and respect immutable data, if you want it to. See More

Top Pro

Supports calling functions from types in an object-oriented manner

if (exists(file)) {} may be written as if (file.exists) {}. writeln(file); may be written as file.writeln(); isDivisibleBy(10, 2); may be written as 10.isDivisibleBy(2); writeln(isEven(add(5, 5))); may be written as 5.add(5).isEven().writeln(); See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way

Because all types can be treated as objects, all files can call functions in the same manner -- even stdin and stdout. stdout.writeln(); stdin.readln(); file.writeln(); file.readln(); See More

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score 45 · Answer 2

Python

Top Pro

Comes with extensive libraries

Python ships with a large standard library, including modules for everything from writing graphical applications, running servers, and doing unit testing. This means that beginners won't need to spend time searching for tools and libraries just to get started on their projects. See More

Top Con

Speed can matter

Python, like many interpreted and untyped languages, is fairly slow compared to compiled languages like C, C++ or Java. Sometimes this won't matter, but when it does you're talking about twenty times slower than C/C++ and ten times slowed than Java. You need to have a plan for what you will do if it is too slow. See More

RespectableTethra's Experience

awesome coz the language is just so simple See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.9.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

GZipped size:22.5MB

See All Specs

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Python's syntax is very clear and readable, making it excellent for beginners. The lack of extra characters like semicolons and curly braces reduces distractions, letting beginners focus on the meaning of the code. Significant whitespace also means that all code is properly and consistently indented. The language also uses natural english words such as 'and' and 'or', meaning that beginners need to learn fewer obscure symbols. On top of this, Python's dynamic type system means that code isn't cluttered with type information, which would further distract beginners from what the code is doing. See More

Top Con

Not good for mobile development

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

DynamicLaima's Experience

simple to learn, both from scratch or as an experienced programmer. lot of useful libraries of all kinds. a very strong and motivated support community. widely used in scientific and all purpouse community. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials

Python's popularity and beginner friendliness has led to a wealth of tutorials and example code on the internet. This means that when beginners have questions, they're very likely to be able to find an answer on their own just by searching. This is an advantage over some languages that are not as popular or covered as in-depth by its users. See More

Top Con

Significant whitespace

While proper formatting is essential for any programmer, beginners often have trouble understanding the need and lack the discipline to do it. Add to that all those editors that randomly convert N spaces (usually 8) to tabs and you get an instant disaster. See More

VersatileLaverna's Experience

i love python See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Installs and works on every major operating systems if not already installed by default (Linux, macOS). See More

Top Con

Inelegant and messy language design

The first impression given by well-chosen Python sample code is quite attractive. However, very soon a lack of unifying philosophy / theory behind the language starts to show more and more. This includes issues with OOP such as lack of consistency in the use of object methods vs. functions (e.g., is it x.sort() or sorted(x), or both for lists?), made worse by too many functions in global name space. Method names via mangling and the init(self) look and feel like features just bolted on an existing simpler language. See More

Top Pro

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Python is commonly used in data science and has many libraries for scientific computing, such as numpy, pandas, matplotlib, etc. See More

Top Con

Language fragmentation

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

Top Pro

Easy to get started

On top of the wealth of tutorials and documentation, and the fact that it ships with a sizeable standard library, Python also ships with both an IDE (Integrated Development Environment: A graphical environment for editing running and debugging your code); as well as a text-based live interpreter. Both help users to get started trying out code immediately, and give users immediate feedback that aids learning. See More

Top Con

Whitespace sensitive syntax

Hurts the eyes and is the cause of unnecessary errors. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

The Python community has put a lot of work into creating excellent documentation filled with plain english describing functionality. Contrast this with other languages, such as Java, where documentation often contains a dry enumeration of the API. As a random example, consider GUI toolkit documentation - the tkinter documentation reads almost like a blog article, answering questions such as 'How do I...', whereas Java's Swing documentation contains dry descriptions that effectively reiterate the implementation code. On top of this, most functions contain 'Doc Strings', which mean that documentation is often immediately available, without even the need to search the internet. See More

Top Con

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

While it's a good language to learn and use after you have mastered a couple of other less rigid programming languages, it's definitely not good for first-time learners. Both the language itself and its community have made it quite clear that you should do everything the "Pythonic way" to get the best results, that it feels more like an opinionated framework instead of a general-purpose programming language, which means if you are a first-time learner and getting too "tuned" to the "Pythonic way" it will be much harder for you to learn other less-opinionated languages compared to the other way around. Like any programming languages and/or frameworks, I'd recommend first-time learners to learn less opinionated ones first to open up your mind, then learn some of the more opinionated ones to increase productivity for specific fields of works. After all, programming languages are just some utilities for the human mind to interface with the computers, and there are more suitable tools for different tasks, and you should master the "Pythonic way" (after you already have adequate experience in computer programming) instead of locking your mind too close to the "Pythonic way" as a first-time learner. See More

Top Pro

Easy to find jobs

Python's popularity also means that it's commonly in use in production at many companies - it's even one of the primary languages in use at Google. Furthermore, as a concise scripting language, it's very commonly used for smaller tasks, as an alternative to shell scripts. Python was also designed to make it easy to interface with other languages such as C, and so it is often used as 'glue code' between components written in other languages. See More

Top Con

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

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

Top Pro

Very similar to pseudo-code

When learning Computer Science concepts such as algorithms and data structures, many texts use pseudo-code. Having a language such as Python whose syntax is very similar to pseudo-code is an obvious advantage that makes learning easier. See More

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since Python is a dynamically typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using Python as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This also will cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Supports various programming paradigms

Python supports three 'styles' of programming: Procedural programming. Object orientated programming. Functional programming. All three styles can be seamlessly interchanged and can be learnt in harmony in Python rather than being forced into one point of view, which is helpful for easing confusion over the debate amongst programmers over which programming paradigm is best, as developers will get the chance to try all of them. See More

Top Con

Worst language design ever

Instead of sticking to a certain paradigm, the original writer of the language couldn't make up his mind, and took something from everywhere, but messing it up as he went by. This is possibly one of the worst balanced languages ever. People who pollute their mind with Python and think it's the next best thing after sliced bread, will have to un-learn a lot of garbage 'pythonesque' habits to actually learn how to program. It's not because the academic world uses it a lot, that it's a good language. It says something about the inability of the academic world to write decent code, actually. See More

Top Pro

Can be used in many domains

Python can be used across virtually all domains: scientific, network, games, graphics, animation, web development, machine learning, and data science. See More

Top Con

Might not be very future-proof

Lots of features that will probably be crucial as time goes (good support for parallelism for example) are missing or are not that well-supported in Python. See More

Top Pro

Interpreters for JS, Microtontrollers, .Net , Java & others

Python is not limited to just be cross platform. It goes far beyond all high level languages since it can run on top of several other frameworks & architectures : Examples of interpreters: Standard (PC Win/Lin/Mac, ARM, Raspberry, Smartphones): CPython usually, but some more specialized for smartphones: Kyvi, QPython, ... Web Browser JS : Brython, PyJS, .Net : IronPython Java: Jython Microcontrollers with WiFi like ESP8266 or ESP32: MicroPython Can be statically compiled (instead of interpreted) with Cython. (Do not mix up with cPython) With python, you're sure your code can run (almost) everywhere, from 2€ computers to the most expensives. So, for instance, with Jython you can access the Java libraries with Python language. See More

Top Con

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages

i.e. running js as a script in a node is trivial. Even languages that were not meant to run as a script are easy to use as a scripting language with just a .sh file. See More

Top Pro

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. See More

Top Con

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Once you have you program the process of having a way to send it to others to use is fragile and fragmented. Python is still looking for the right solution for this with still differences in opinion. These differences are a huge counter to Python's mantra of "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." See More

Top Pro

Advanced community projects

There are outstanding projects being actively developed in Python. Projects such as the following to name a random four: Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. iPython: a rich architecture for interactive computing with shells, a notebook and which is embeddable as well as wrapping and able to wrap libraries written in other languages. Mercurial: a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface. PyPy: a fast, compliant alternative implementation of the Python language (2.7.3 and 3.2.3) with several advantages and distinct features including a Just-in-Time compiler for speed, reduced memory use, sandboxing, micro-threads for massive concurrency, ... When you move on from being a learner you can still stay with Python for those advanced tasks. See More

Top Con

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Although the principals of multi-threading in Python are good, the simplicity can be deceptive and multi-threaded applications are not always easy to create when multiple additional factors are accounted for. Multi-thread processes have to be explicitly created manually. See More

Top Pro

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. See More

Top Con

Python environments can become a total unusable mess

Updating a library could result in applying dependences that in turn render unusable other libraries. re-installing python environments is a common task. and having to deal with library dependency a horrible mess. In a professional environment python requires (as per the above) a yearly subscription. Thus in the real world it is not free. It's free if you want to put your time to deal with python environment and libraries dependencies yourself, or if you just download a python distribution every other year. See More

Top Pro

Static typing via mypy

Python's syntax supports optional type annotations for use with a third-party static type checker, which can catch a certain class of bugs at compile time. This also makes it easier for beginners to gradually transition to statically typed languages instead of wrestling with the compiler from the start. See More

Top Con

Unflexible userbase

You will be expected to rigidly stick to the coding practices and to do everything by-the-numbers. See More

Top Pro

Best chances of earning most money

According to Quartz, Python programming skills on average earn $100,000 per year. Closely followed by Java, C++, JavaScript, C, and R with $90,000 per year and above. See More

Top Con

Glue language, not production ready

It is only a glue language. What's done in python cannot be left for production. See More

Top Pro

Good introduction to data structures

Python's built-in support and syntax for common collections such as lists, dictionaries, and sets, as well as supporting features like list comprehensions, foreach loops, map, filter, and others, makes their use much easier to get into for beginners. Python's support for Object Orient Programming, but with dynamic typing, also makes the topic of Data Structures much more accessible, as it takes the focus off of more tedious aspects, such as type casting and explicitly defined interfaces. Python's convention of only hiding methods through prefacing them with underscores further takes the focus off of details such as Access Modifiers common in languages such as Java and C++, allowing beginners to focus on the core concepts, without much worry for language specific implementation details. See More

Top Con

Hard to debug other people's code

As the structure of Python code is based on conventions many developers are not following them and so it is difficult to follow/extract the design of not trivial application from the code. See More

Top Pro

One right way to do things

One of the Guiding Principles of Python is that there should be only one obvious way to do things. This is helpful for beginners because it means that there is likely a best answer for questions about how things should be done. See More

Top Con

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

Python has an active and helpful community, such as the comp.lang.python Google Groups, StackOverflow, reddit, etc. See More

Top Con

Error handling

Python's error handling is dumb. When running a script, Python checks for errors and if there is, it won't run it, just show a trace back. blang instead runs the code before the error, fails at the error, but continues running the script no matter what. See More

Top Pro

Import Turtle

Do something visually interesting in minutes by using the turtle standard library package. See here. Turtle graphics is a popular way for introducing programming to kids. It was part of the original Logo programming language developed by Wally Feurzig and Seymour Papert in 1966. Imagine a robotic turtle starting at (0, 0) in the x-y plane. After an import turtle, give it the command turtle.forward(15), and it moves (on-screen!) 15 pixels in the direction it is facing, drawing a line as it moves. Give it the command turtle.right(25), and it rotates in-place 25 degrees clockwise. Turtle can draw intricate shapes using programs that repeat simple moves. Example Turtle Star Drawing from turtle import * color('red', 'yellow') begin_fill() while True: forward(200) left(170) if abs(pos()) < 1: break end_fill() done() See More

Top Con

Libraries are not professionally developed, but they are bug prone, with significant feature overlap among them, and too many of them

Libraries are not professionally developed. This is specially important when considering python as an alternative to MATLAB or Mathematica (or even Julia?). That results in a number of problems: 1.) They are prone to major bugs as it was the case with simpy simplify function that up until 2019 used to introduce a 0,25 factor (just like that) thus destroying symbolic calculations, without notice. Such bug only got corrected after many years. 2.) There is significant overlap in the plethora of libraries available, but complete feature set usually needs the usage of several like libraries. This results in the evaluation/prototyping phase of any project to be utterly tedious/difficult/time-consuming. See More

Top Pro

Your tool for easy prototyping

Easily automatize tasks, generate UIs, do all you need in programming quickly: server, web, embedded, file manipulation, data analysis, lab automation. ideal for home projects, low budget (or no budget) scientific projects. Professionals should know other production ready language. See More

Top Con

Limited support for functional programming

While Python imports some very useful and elegant bits and pieces from FP (such as list comprehensions, higher-order functions such as map and filter), the language's support for FP falls short of the expectations raised by included features. For example, no tail call optimisation or proper lambdas. Referential transparency can be destroyed in unexpected ways even when it seems to be guaranteed. Function composition is not built into the core language. Etc. See More

Top Pro

The do it all of programming languages

Python can do almost everything in computing. However it is only top choice in AI due to it having been used for APIs of frameworks such as Keras, tensor, etc. However it is still considered an scripting language, or a glue language only. But python is the defacto API language for many applications in many areas. See More

Top Con

Assignment

Heavily relies on assignment, with no distinction between defining the variable and assigning the value. This makes it necessary to introduce rather complex environmental model of computation. See More

Top Pro

Mobile versions

Mobile versions are available but can be difficult to find. Examples for android are pydroid and qpython. See More

Top Pro

Easy

Python is easy to learn and use. Most of the apps I make are written in Python. See More

Top Pro

Includes pygame library

Want to start game development? No problem! Using pygame open-source library you can fast begin creating games without worrying about pointers or undefined behaviors which they exists in C/C++. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn, More to Go

It is very easy to learn and it has community support and many categories available. See More

Top Pro

Easy for new users and experienced programmers

(If you can get over whitespace formatting) See More

See All

score 19 · Answer 3

Free Pascal

Top Pro

Cross platform

Many target platforms and architectures. See More

Top Con

Not strong company backing

Other languages have informatics giants behind them developing the languages and improving upon an already complete tool set. Pascal is dead. See More

MagicalHannahannah's Experience

Excellent and fast development. Easy development of complicated GUI applications when used with Lazarus. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Easy GUI development across platforms using Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE

Top Con

Not exclusive features means what Pascal has others have it too

Pascal has been around for long enough for all of its feature set to have been copied, improved, everywhere else. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Con

Outdated tooling

Like back to DOS days. best language is not enough to be a best multipurpose tool. See More

Top Pro

Powerful

Close to metal while being high level, performance to match C/C++. See More

Top Con

Top Notch Pascal is Ada and even that is a niche only language these days

Ada for Avionics is still a thing, for a few. that's a very narrow niche. Pascal is not used today to be even considered multipurpose which should involve collaboration. See More

Top Pro

Fast compiler

Very fast, even big programs compile very quickly. See More

Top Pro

Strong company and open-source support

Embarcadero for Delphi dialect, RemObjects for Oxygene dialect, Free Pascal/Lazarus(open-source), PascalABC.NET (open-source), etc... See More

Top Pro

Run time checks

Strong Typing and range checking in run time. Wouldn't let you down in terms of mistakes made related to input overflows or data type mismatch mistakes. See More

See All

score 21 · Answer 4

V

Top Pro

Sum types

V has sum types. See More

Top Con

Does not support OOP

Uses class-free OO, like Go. Can assign methods to structs, embed structs in other structs, has interfaces, etc... See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Site:vlang.io, https://github.com/vlang

Typing discipline:Strong, static, inferred, structural

License:MIT

See All Specs

Top Pro

Inline assembly

Can add Assembly code. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Highly understandable language. See More

Top Pro

Fast like C

V is easier than C and fast like C. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Compile app to run on different OSes. See More

Top Pro

Closures

V has closures, which gives the user additional options and usefulness. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity

V is simple and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Supports concurrency and channels

Can run functions concurrently that communicate over channels. See More

Top Pro

Generics

V has generics. See More

Top Pro

C Interop

Can import C libraries, structs, and headers. See More

Top Pro

Can create multi-OS GUIs

Multi-OS GUI creation is more integrated into the language than others. See More

Top Pro

Friendly and helpful community

Just check the V Discord channel or their GitHub Discussions and you will see by yourself. See More

Top Pro

Single paradigm

Follows the philosophy that there should be only one way to do something, as opposed to multi-paradigm languages like C++. See More

Top Pro

Safety

V is very safe. See More

Top Pro

Fast compile times

Compiles programs fast, less waiting around, so more productive and fun. See More

See All

score 12 · Answer 5

Guile

Top Con

It is a LISP not a C

For AI research LISP is better. For anything else C, and C derivatives are the industry standard. See More

Top Pro

Easy to customize and extend applications

Guile makes it easy for users of your application to write extensions without needing to understand the plumbing of your program. See More

ProudTenjin's Experience

Great Language with helpful community and very good documentation. Also comes Batteries included. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.0.0

Platforms:Linux, Windows, OSX

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

Price:Free

Top Con

Guile is better understood as an extension language for C and C++

Guile is an adaptation of the scheme programming language, and it is aimed at serving as an extension language for C or C++, two true general purpose programming languages that are prerequisites for Guile. See More

Top Pro

GNU's official extension language

Chances are a system running enough GNU software will already have it installed. See More

PerseveringCottyto's Experience

I am working with GNU Guile to create application. I find it very pleasent and the result is efficient. See More

Top Con

There aren't many other areas besides its major scope of interest

A true general purpose programming language is that with which anything can be done. That is not the case with guile, outside its major scope of interest, preferred scripting language for the GNU projects, the language is practically not used. See More

Top Pro

Guile is easy to start using for Bash, Python and C programmers

With Guile you can seamlessly program across languages such as Bash, Guile, C and Python. Simple scripts and programs that have started out as Bash-code can easily be extended in Guile when Bash is no longer sufficient by using the guile-bash library, and Guile itself can easily be extended in either C or Python (using the python-on-guile library) when Guile is no longer sufficient, e.g. due to performance or lack of libraries that accomplishes special tasks. Switching to Guile from either Bash, Python or C is therefore easy. See More

ImmaculateCromCruach's Experience

A few API calls that was written in Bash using curl and jq eventually became a large API client that works with both json and XML data, and I used guile-bash to seamlessly extend the original Bash code which was great. See More

Top Con

It cannot compete with the humongous ecosystems developed around true top languages

The ecosystems around Python, Java, C, C# just are so much larger that there is not even a fair comparison with any ecosystem for guile. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

The documentation provides conceptual overviews, tutorials, and a detailed reference for all commands, functions, and operators. See More

Top Con

Language adoption is lackluster at best

Nobody uses this to even be considered as a top language in anything. See More

Top Pro

Interactive programming

One of Guile's goals is to allow the user to experiment with code changes, and also modify code during runtime. Its REPL is also very feature-rich. See More

Top Con

Poor IDE support (but awesome Emacs integration)

Most guilers probably use Emacs with the amazing Geiser mode. Vim is also an option. Otherwise IDE integration is rather poor. See More

Top Pro

POSIX Threads

Supports native threads, thus enabling full parallelism and better integration with all sorts of C or C++ apps. See More

Top Con

Weak copyleft

LGPL. See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 6

Java

Top Pro

Mature ecosystem

The language and all its tools have enough time to age and they've aged well. See More

Top Con

Unnecessarily obtuse and verbose

If you like typing 40 lines of code to open a file, Java is the language for you. If, on the other hand, you’d actually like to get something done, look elsewhere. See More

Top Pro

Most mature virtual machine

The other virtual machines just are not as developed as Java's. See More

Top Con

Memory hungry

Running the virtual machine, application server and application itself consumes significant amount of resources. See More

Top Pro

Modern and fast language

Multiparadigm. Proven, JIT can be optimized for even greater speed. Real, fast and complete Production language and eco-system, unlike many others. See More

Top Con

Oracle

Enough said. In more detail: Oracle has acquired Java from Sun and continues to surround it with controversy ever since (legendary lawsuit with google, money extortion from the enterprise users etc.). See More

Top Pro

Top choice in many fields

Top choice, not an alternative in many fields. Mobile Android. Server. Database engines. Next generation database engines. Enterprise applications. Systems on consumer electronics. An alternative in: Embedded systems, data analysis. See More

Top Con

Constant security issues

Have to worry more about security issues. See More

Top Pro

The lingua franca of Enterprise Server-desktop applications

The other one that would rival JAVA is C#, and only that. See More

Top Con

Too much focus on class based OOP

Excessive focus on class based OOP causes the language to be messy, restrictive, and hard to use. See More

Top Pro

Type-safe

It is easier to catch errors sooner. See More

Top Con

Many Java jobs are outsourced to third world countries

However there are still some high paying jobs in first world locations. See More

Top Pro

Top language for mobile development for Android

Top Pro

Lingua franca of database Engines APIs

Database APIs come in two flavors: JAVA and C++, the rest are just ports from these two. See More

Top Pro

JAVA in embedded Systems

JAVA in avionics is strongly adopted. See More

Top Pro

A mandatory technical competence sought after by employers in many fields

Not only is JAVA a top choice in many fields but it is also a mandatory technical competence that has created one of the largest job markets for programmers. See More

Top Pro

Verbosity

It makes it easy to debug and to read code. See More

See All

score 29 · Answer 7

Go

Top Pro

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Goroutines are "lightweight threads" that runs on OS threads. They provide a simple way for concurrent operations — prepending a function with go will execute it concurrently. It utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing execution effortless across goroutines. The maximum number of OS threads goroutines can run on may be defined at compile time with the GOMAXPROCS variable. See More

Top Con

Hard to abstract even the simplest notions

Go is famously regarded as very simple. However, this simplicity becomes problematic in time. Programmers who use Go find themselves over and over again writing the same thing from a very low point of view. Domains not already served by libraries that are easy to glue are very difficult to get into. See More

MotivatedMegaera's Experience

Google has shown world it can't be trusted. Uses monopoly-like power to inhibit, choke out, and crush other and better programming languages and competition. Is causing harm and evil to the world. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.21.0

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac etc.

Developer:Google with Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike

Top Pro

Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software

Go software can be immediately installed, regardless of your operating system, package manager, or processor architecture with the go get command. Software is compiled statically by default so there is no need to worry about software dependencies on the client system. Makefiles and headers are no longer necessary, as the package system automatically resolves dependencies, downloads source code and compiles via a single command: go build. See More

Top Con

Forces K&R style and won't allow Allman style

Golang developers were extremely short-sighted and biased by forcing the K&R style, which should never have happened. Basically kicking Allman style users out of their language. See More

ShrewdUkur's Experience

Google calling the shots. Eat what they feed you. They have no worries, search results or YouTube recommendations will be whatever. You lose, Google wins. See More

Top Pro

Multiple variables may be assigned on a single line

This conveniently eliminates the need to create temporary variables. Fibonacci example: x, y = y, x+y See More

Top Con

Golang controlled by Google

Solves Google problems, which might not be your or the majority of user's problems. Was created for the benefit and purposes of Google, so is less flexible in language direction and options. See More

Davis's Experience

I view Golang in the same way that I once viewed Python when it was released; as the new, powerful, yet simple language that would innovate for years to come. I think that Golang continued where Python left off, with more attention to safety, and finally achieving an easy multi-threading model. It was able to do this without ever reducing readability. See More

Top Pro

Great language for building networking services

Go was started as a systems language but now it has fully committed in the niche of networking services. This has been a brilliant move by Go because it allows them to capitalize on the immense talent of the Go engineering team (who are in the most part network engineers). In a world dominated by Java EE and slow scripting language, Go was a breath of fresh air and it continues to be one of the most powerful languages if you want to build networking services. See More

Top Con

Not suited for GUI design

There is no forms designer included for instance. See More

Top Pro

Great team working behind it

Go has a solid team of engineers working on it (some of the best networking engineers in the world are working on Go). Up until now, the great engineering of the language has compensated for its lack of power. See More

Top Con

Does not have sum types

Makes it harder to have functions of different parameters types in a non OOP language. Thus messy generics and interfaces, and more confusion, where sum types could have solved a number of issues. See More

Top Pro

Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to object-oriented programming

All types are essentially objects, be they type aliases or structs. The compiler automatically associates types to their methods at compile time. Those methods are automatically associated to all interfaces that match. This allows you to gain the benefits of multiple inheritance without glue code. As a result of the design, classes are rendered obsolete and the resulting style is easy to comprehend. See More

Top Con

Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection

Practically no meaningful Go application can be written without indirect function calls and garbage collection, these are central to Go's core infrastructure. But these are major impediments to achieving good performance. See More

Top Pro

Simplified C-like syntax that is as easy to read and write as Python

The language is designed in a manner that seems logical. Syntax is simplified to reduce burden on the programmer and compiler developers. See More

Top Con

Ugly syntax

Top Pro

Supports 'modules' in the form of packages

Every Go source file contains a package line that indicates which package a file belongs to. If the name of the package is 'main', it indicates that this is a program that will be compiled into a binary. Otherwise, it will recognize that it is a package. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have true enums

Golang does weirdness with const versus having real enums, like other languages. This reflects the stubbornness and shortsightedness of the core developers, similar to the issue with generics, where it was denied that it was needed until it became too obvious that it should have been added years ago. See More

Top Pro

Performance is on the order of C and Java

Go is blazing fast, but easier to write than Python, JS, Ruby, or many other dynamic languages. See More

Top Con

It appears Google uses position to snuff out or suppress other languages

Newer languages that could threaten Golang (or other Google controlled languages) appear to have suppressed search results on Google and YouTube. Dangerous situation where large company can manipulate user choice and market share. The freedom to freely choose and user rights need to be protected. See More

Top Pro

You can get a job knowing Golang

Popular language at the top of indexes and on job listings. See More

Top Con

Easy to shadow variable

Due to single character only difference, declare and assign statement can easily shadow variable from outer scope unconsciously. Example: err := nil if xxx { err := somefunctionthatreturnsanerr } return err // always return nil See More

Top Pro

Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project

This helps keep every programmer on the same page in a project and eliminates arguments over formatting styles. See More

Top Con

Implementation of interfaces are difficult to figure out

Finding out what interfaces are implemented by a struct requires a magic crystal ball. They are easy to write, but difficult to read and trawl through. See More

Top Pro

Built-in unit testing

The idiomatic approach to writing a Go software project is to perform test-driven development with unit testing. Every source code file should have an associated *_test.go file which tests functions in the code. See More

Top Con

As of 2021, It is not a top language

It is a language backed by Google but that's where it ends. It will be most likely a top language in some five years time, but as of present times it is not a predominant language to be even called the one tool as in "the general purpose programming language". See More

Top Pro

The go compiler compiles binaries instantly — as fast as a scripting language interpreter

Compiled binaries are fast — about as fast in C in most cases. Compiles on every OS without effort — truly cross-platform compiler. As a result of the fast compilation speed, you can use the gorun program to use go source code as if it was a scripting language. See More

Top Con

The current state of market adoption for GoLang seems to revolve around hopeful predominance

GoLang does not seem to have gotten passed it with the threshold of new technology hooray, and doesn't seem to have settled down fine with established programmers that know and support more than one language (and technology house) at a time. Golang is most likely the language for back-end databases drivers in the near future, but it is still pending to be seen if it can make it as a general purpose language. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Read Cross-compiling a C++ CLI Application. See More

Top Con

Bizarre syntactic choices like a unique date format

Top Pro

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

Godoc is provided to automatically generate API documentation for Go projects. Godoc also hosts it’s own self-contained web server that will list documentation for all installed packages in your Go path. See More

Top Con

No forms designer

Those who are used to Visual Studio can feel the lack of a forms designer for rapid development. See More

Top Pro

Programmers don't have to argue over what 10% subet of the language to implement in their software project

The language promotes programming in a specific idiomatic style, which helps keep every programmer on the same page. See More

Top Con

Lacks support for immutable data

Only way to prevent something from being mutated is to make copies of it, and to be very careful to not mutate it. See More

Top Pro

API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize

Only features deemed critical are added to the language to prevent cruft from working it's way into the language. The language is small enough to fit inside one's head without having to repeatedly open documentation. Documentation is hosted on an official webpage in a manner that is simple to read and understand. See More

Top Con

Designed to make the programmer expendable

Go was designed for large team projects where many contributors may be incompetent. That Go can still get things done under these conditions is a testament to its utility in this niche. Go's infamously weak abstraction power is thus a feature, not a bug, meant to prevent your teammates from doing too much damage. This also means any team member can be easily replaced by another code monkey at minimum cost. Good for the company, bad for you. The more talented programmers, on the other hand, will be very frustrated by having one hand tied behind their back. See More

Top Pro

Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals

This naturally also supports first class and high order functions, so you may pass functions as variables to other functions. See More

Top Con

It is a C++ replacement

It was designed to be a better C++ not a truy general purpose programming language See More

Top Pro

Syntax for exported code from a package is simplified to be less verbose than other languages

Any variable, type and function whose name begins with a capital letter will be exported by a project, while all other code remains private. There is no longer a need to signify that a piece of code is 'private' or 'public' manually. See More

Top Pro

Supports splitting source code into multiple files

As long as every source code file in a directory has the same package name, the compiler will automatically concatenate all of the files together during the compilation process. See More

See All

score 17 · Answer 8

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

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

Typing discipline:static

Paradigm:imperative

Language type:imperative, ALGOL family

See All Specs

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

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

Lots of libraries

You can find a library for almost anything you need. 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

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

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

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

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

No Class Based OOP

A fast, powerful, and flexible language that did not fall into the Class Based OOP rabbit hole. See More

Top Con

Other languages can do it easier or better

Can use alternatives which are easier, more convenient, or less troublesome. Examples are Object Pascal, Golang, Vlang, Odin, Zig, etc... 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

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

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

The usage of basic functionality requires deep knowledge of libraires and how to include them

Other general purpose languages don't bury their basic functionality in the complexity of a std library, or in the complexity of an IO library. Without knowledge of libraries in C you cannot do anything, 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

No classes, objects, or encapsulation

No classes, objects, or encapsulation, means missing out on very crucial features for many developers. Specially for large projects. See More

Top Pro

Performance

C performance, being the lowest of high level programming languages, is practically unrivaled within the spectrum of today's general purpose languages. To go faster you'd need FORTRAN, or even going down to optimze assembler. C++ is often used instead of C in high performance computing because of it being object oriented thus ideal for large projects. C is performance oriented in low scale projects (i.e one server, or an OS) 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

The best at so many things

despite what the slant community might say, there is no other computer language that is so good at so many things: Embedded systems, Operating Systems, System drivers, creating other languages, creating virtual machines, creating run times, creating software units, scientific computing libraries (just below FORTRAN and C++) 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

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

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

More control over the code

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

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

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 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

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

A common technical competence that peoples from different areas have

Throughout the decades people have learnt C, thus writing C makes it possible for other people to maintain the code, unlike much more modern languages for which there is no spread competence yet. See More

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 Pro

C is simple with lesser rules than any other language

C is standardized and it is the goto language when you have to speed things up 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

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

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

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 Con

Long 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 Con

Requires memory management

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

See All

score 4 · Answer 9

Haskell

Top Con

Too academic, hard to find "real world" code examples

Top Pro

Mathematical consistency

As Haskell lends itself exceedingly well to abstraction, and borrows heavily from the culture of pure mathematics, it means that a lot more code conforms to very high-level abstractions. You can expect code from vastly different libraries to follow the same rules, and to be incredibly self-consistent. It's not uncommon to find that a parser library works the same way as a string library, which works the same way as a window manager library. This often means that getting familiar and productive with new libraries is often much easier than in other languages. See More

Specs

Site:https://www.haskell.org/

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Haskell lends itself well to powerful abstractions - the result is that even basic, commonly used libraries, while easy to use, are implemened using a vocabularly that requires a lot of backround in abstract mathematics to understand. Even a concept as simple as "combine A and B" is often, both in code and in tutorials, described in terms of confusing and discouraging terms like "monad", "magma", "monoid", "groupoid", and "ring". This also occasionally bears its ugly head in the form of complicated error messages from type inference. See More

Top Pro

Open source

All Haskell implementations are completely free and open source. See More

Top Con

Symbols everywhere

Haskell allows users to define their own infix operators, even with their own precedence. The result is that some code is filled with foreign looking operators that are assumed to be special-case syntax. Even for programmers who know they're just functions, operators that change infix precedence can potentially break expectations of how an expression is evaluated, if not used with care. See More

Top Pro

Forces you to learn pure functional programming

It is pure and does not mix other programming paradigms into the language. This forces you to learn functional programming in its most pure form. You avoid falling back on old habits and learn an entirely new way to program. See More

Top Con

Only pure functional programming

Not proper functional programming but a subset of the style called pure functional programming. See More

Top Pro

Functions curry automatically

Every function that expects more than one arguments is basically a function that returns a partially applied function. This is well-suited to function composition, elegance, and concision. See More

Top Con

Lazily Evaluated

Haskell's lazy evaluation implies a level of indirection - you're not passing a value, you're passing a thunk. This is often difficult to grasp not just for beginners, but for experienced programmers coming from strictly evaluated languages. This also means that, since for many, strict evaluation is their first instinct, initial expectations of a function's performance and complexity are often broken. See More

Top Pro

Highly transferable concepts

Haskell's referential transparency, consistency, mathematics-oriented culture, and heavy amount of abstraction encourage problem solving at a very high level. The fact that this is all built upon little other than function application means that not only is the thought process, but even concrete solutions are very transferable to any other language. In fact, in Haskell, it's quite common for a solution to simply be written as an interpreter that can then generate code in some other language. Many other languages employ language-specific features, or work around a lack of features with heavy-handed design patterns that discourage abstraction, meaning that a lot of what is learned, and a lot of code that is needed to solve a particular problem just isn't very applicable to any other language's ecosystem. See More

Top Con

You have to learn more than just FP

Haskell is not only a functional language but also a lazy, and statically typed one. Not only that but it's almost necessary to learn about monads before you can do anything useful. See More

Top Pro

Referentially transparent

Haskell's Purely Functional approach means that code is referentially transparent. This means that to read a function, one only needs to know its arguments. Code works the same way that expressions work in Algebra class. There's no need to read the whole source code to determine if there's some subtle reference to some mutable state, and no worries about someone writing a "getter" that also mutates the object it's called on. Functions are all directly testable in the REPL, and there's no need to remember to call methods in a certain order to properly initialize an object. No breakage of encapsulation, and no leaky abstractions. See More

Top Con

Long compile time

GHC is known for its long compile time, and addressing this doesn't seem to be a high priority of the main developers. See More

Top Pro

Very few language constructs

The base language relies primarily on function application, with a very small amount of special-case syntax. Once you know the rules for function application, you know most of the language. See More

Top Con

Curried type signatures obfuscate what were the in and out types originally

Top Pro

Hand-writeable concise syntax

Conciseness of Haskell lets us to write the expression on the whiteboard or paper and discuss with others easily. This is a strong benefit to learn FP over other languages. See More

Top Con

Documentation for most packages is short and lacking

A few Haskell packages are well documented but this is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time a list of function signatures is what passes for documentation. See More

Top Pro

Easy syntax for people with a STEM degree

Since the basic syntax is very similar to mathematics, Haskell syntax should be easy for people who have taken higher math courses since they would be used to the symbols used in maths. See More

Top Con

You need some time to start seeing results

Haskell's static typing, while helpful when building a project, can be positively frustrating for beginners. Quick feedback for errors means delaying the dopamine hit of code actually running. While in some languages, a beginner's first experience may be their code printing "Hello World" and then crashing, in Haskell, similar code would more likely be met with an incomprehensible type error. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Haskell is a very terse language, particularly due to its type inference. This means there's nothing to distract from the intent of the code, making it very readable. This is in sharp contrast to languages like Java, where skimming code requires learning which details can be ignored. Haskell's terseness also lends itself to very clear inline examples in textbooks, and makes it a pleasure to read through code even on a cellphone screen. See More

Top Con

Package manager is unstable & lacking features

Cabal (There are other choices but this is the most popular) can not uninstall a package. Also working at a few locations it is difficult to have the same environment for each one be the same. See More

Top Pro

Quick feedback

It's often said that, in Haskell, if it compiles, it works. This short feedback loop can speed up learning process, by making it clear exactly when and where mistakes are made. See More

Top Con

Language Extensions lead to unfamiliar code

Haskell's language extensions, while making the language incredibly flexible for experienced users, makes a lot of code incredibly unfamiliar for beginners. Some pragmas, like NoMonomorphismRestriction, have effects that seem completely transparent in code, leading beginners to wonder why it's there. Others, like ViewPatterns, and particularly TemplateHaskell, create completely new syntax rules that render code incomprehensible to beginners expecting vanilla function application. See More

Top Pro

Popular in teaching

Haskell is really popular in universities and academia as a tool to teach programming. A lot of books for people who don't know programming are written around Haskell. This means that there are a lot of resources for beginners in programming with which to learn Haskell and functional programming concepts. See More

Top Pro

Powerful Categorical Abstractions

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language See More

Top Pro

Powerful categorical abstractions

Makes categorical higher order abstractions easy to use and natural to the language. See More

See All

score 14 · Answer 10

Nim

Top Pro

Good balance between syntax concise and performance

Top Con

Market adoption

Niche language. Goes mostly unused and is unknown, to the extent it can't be recommended. See More

AwesomestLeto's Experience

Nim is a pretender, Mojo is the true contender. Mojo is a superset of Python, so can really transfer one's code over. With Mojo, no longer need C/C++, and defintely don't need preteners like Nim. Mojo developers work with and help the Python community, where Nim is just leeching off the name and popularity. It should have copied and leeched off Free/Object Pascal more, from which it actually came from. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.6.12

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

License:MIT

GZipped size:13 MB

See All Specs

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

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

Top Con

Generics are a mess

Confused mishmash of conflicting ideas. See More

DebonairAnbay's Experience

Slant's rankings are complete trash. Clearly Nim is given special treatment, where none of its CONs show on its main page. Disgusting bias and pretense, by presenting false fan rankings. Nim is a lowly player that few take serious and is of no consequence. 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 Con

Concurrency hard to use

Difficult to use, too verbose. 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 Con

Lacks void / null safety

Easy to get involved in safety issues. 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 Con

Community harsh if criticized

If one even dares to start a discussion about a feature on discord, subreddit or github one will be aggressively shut down. See More

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. See More

Top Con

Memory management disasters

Will be stuck with bad performance while choosing from all kinds of memory management options that aren't good. See More

Top Pro

Really cross-platform

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

Top Con

Failed wannabe Python knockoff language

Created in 2008, Nim has failed to make TIOBE top 100 or PYPL rankings, despite being old for a programming language. Pythoners can use alternatives like Cython for a more Python-like experience. See More

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

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

Top Con

Whitespace sensitive syntax

Hurts eyes and causes more silly errors. See More

Top Pro

Has built-in async support

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

Top Con

Inconsistent name formatting

Headache creation with snake_case, pascalCase, and being case-insensitive too. 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 Con

Pascal and Ada influence

As much as Pascal and Ada have been (and still are) present in the landscape of programming languages in the military defense niche (VHDL, Ada for avionics, embedded systems, etc) that branch of ALGOL, Pascal, Ada, is pretty much a thing from the past that Nim hasn't succeeded at reviving. 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

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

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

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 11

twinBASIC

Top Pro

twinBASIC programming to replace VB6

twinBASIC programming is a compatible replacement for VB6 See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

Top Pro

100% Backward Compatible with VB6/VBA

Any code that runs in VB6 will run in twinBASIC (once v1 is released). Code that runs in VBA will also run in twinBASIC, though you need to account for any dependencies on the host application's object model (e.g., the Excel or Access Application object). See More

Top Pro

Compatible with and more powerful than VB6

We've waited over 20 tears for a Visual Basic 6 replacement. See More

See All

score 3 · Answer 12

Clojure

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

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.10.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Site:www.clojure.org

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

See All Specs

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

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

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

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

Dynamic language

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

Rich Hickey

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

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 13

Kotlin

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

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.3

Top Con

Android centric

Not so much for multi-OS usage in regards to intent and focus. 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

See All

score 28 · Answer 14

C#

Top Pro

Versatile

.NET offers rich functionality. See More

Top Con

Learning curve

For a beginner the .NET framework can be daunting, the rich functionality means that things often can be done in several ways. See More

Rempas's Experience

I would advice against using any close source product. Further more when its owner is Microsoft. See More

Specs

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

Language type:Interpreted

Current Stable Version:10

Top Pro

Visual Studio

The Visual Studio IDE offers one of the best development environments. The Community Edition and Visual Studio Code can be used for free. See More

Top Con

Very large runtime

Cannot be used for embedded programming. See More

ComposedAntevorta's Experience

Great for multi-platform development and well supported by Microsoft. Microsoft does have a history of dropping multi-platform frameworks in favor of fancier new ones. There are many other frameworks which target mobile platforms for anyone who wants a write once, run anywhere mentality similar to java. See More

Top Pro

Forms

Can be designed visually with the Visual Studio designer for traditional Windows forms, WPF, or Web forms. See More

Top Con

Microsoft will mess up with the Visual studio installation

And all of a sudden you'll need to reinstall the entire thing just because it stopped working. Microsoft assumes that every workstation is connected to the Internet then it is always pushing updates. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

C# was Microsoft's answer to Java, which it resembles. In the beginning C# was a Windows only affair. .NET also allows programming in other languages like VB.NET and F#. ASP.NET can be used for web development. The newer .NET Core allows multi-platform development. See More

Top Pro

3rd Party support

Lot's of tools and libraries available. See More

Top Con

.NET is a mess

Troublesome in regards to being Microsoft centric, updates, security, excessively large, cross-platform issues, etc... See More

Top Pro

Can be used in a variety of fields

With Xamarin for Mobile (ios, android), with .net core asp for server (linux, windows), with .net core for desktop (windows, mac), with mono for desktop (windows, linux), with blazor for web client with webassembly. However, it is not considered top for any of those categories, but it is top choice for Windows desktop with .net framework and top choice for Unity. .net 5 will unify frameworks similar to JVM (just one). See More

Top Con

Windows OS centric

Not very good at being a cross-platform programming language. See More

Top Pro

Cross-Platform

Runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. See More

Top Con

Strictly object oriented

Top Pro

Supported By Microsoft

Constant updates and bug fixes to many popular frameworks, as well as great first-party support from Microsoft. This can be a con as well in certain circumstances. See More

Top Con

Owned by Microsoft

And like always, Microsoft is to be avoided, no exceptions. See More

Top Pro

It is a C like language

Being a C like language counts in favor for it as a general purpose programming language, given the ease of using existing skills to pick up this language easily. There are other superior languages that could be used as a general purpose, such as: F#, Haskell, but the complexity of those languages, being functional, make them strange to the usual C Syntax. C# is better than C whenever garbage collection, Objects, classes, data access, are needed. But C is going to be the choice when hardware access and performance are paramount. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 15

Elixir

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 Con

Very few free resources

Good luck finding anything on YT or many other sites. But the docs are great. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.11.2

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

GZipped size:3.61 MB (without required Erlang VM)

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

See All

Answer 16

C++

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 Pro

Universal, portable, best complexity/efficiency trade-off

Used from browser and games to systems and compilers, too many things been made and working. See More

score 6 · Answer 17

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

See All

score 6 · Answer 18

Perl 6

Top Con

Obscure Syntax

Some constructs are really obscure and a misplaced character in a statement can change the meaning of it dramatically. See More

Top Pro

Platform independent and fast

Specs

Current stable version:6.d (language), Rakudo 2020.09 (implementation)

Site:raku.org

Notes:changed its name to Raku in 2019

Type system:gradual

See All

Answer 19

Ruby

Top Con

Monkeypatching

Requiring a library can change the rules of the language. This is very confusing for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Ruby on Rails

Lays out an easy to follow and opinionated MVC pattern that teaches best practices through necessity. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.6.0

GZipped size:15.9 MB

Top Con

Its ecosystem is limited outside of web development

If you're looking to host, generate, manipulate or secure a website, Ruby is your language. There's also some great support here for infrastructure as code work via Chef. However, it just doesn't have the depth and breadth that Python does. Things like native UI development, high performance math, and embedded / small footprint environments are barely supported at all in Ruby-space. See More

Top Pro

Easy to find job

Top Con

Arcane grammar based on Perl

Ruby is too complicated for beginners: arcane Perlisms; semi-significant whitespace; parentheses are not necessary around method arguments, except for sometimes they are; control constructs could be elegantly implemented with block like Smalltalk (Instead they're baked into the grammar.); verbose block syntax, unless it happens to be the last argument. (proc lambda). There are too many exceptional cases and arcane precedence rules. See More

Top Pro

Pry

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since Ruby is a dynamically typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using Ruby as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This also will cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

What are the best general-purpose programming languages?

29 Options Considered

D

My Recommendation for D

My Recommendation for D

Very fast compilation

Lack of vision

Very flexible template and meta-programming

Poor adoption even after many years of existence

It's a state-of-art evolution of C

All the downsides of garbage collection without any of its benefits

Compile-time Function Execution

Failed at becoming alternative to C or C++

Doesn't force you to deal with memory management

Divisively went the garbage collection route

Unit testing built-in

Easy to integrate with C and C++

Built-in Unicode support

Has an improved C subset

Easy to read and understand code

Supports calling functions from types in an object-oriented manner

Static with type inference

Provides a powerful data structure on top of C's arrays called slices

You don't need to explicitly compile file to run - you can do `rdmd <your-file>.d` and will implicitly compile and run for you

Industrial quality

Uniform Function Call Syntax (UFCS) which allows for elegant function chaining

Designed for concurrency and parallelism

Provable purity and immutability

Supports calling functions from types in an object-oriented manner

Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way

Python

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Comes with extensive libraries

Speed can matter

Clear syntax

Not good for mobile development

Lots of tutorials

Significant whitespace

Cross-platform

Inelegant and messy language design

Has many libraries for scientific computing, data mining and machine learning

Language fragmentation

Easy to get started

Whitespace sensitive syntax

Good documentation

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

Easy to find jobs

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Very similar to pseudo-code

Does not teach you about data types

Supports various programming paradigms

Worst language design ever

Can be used in many domains

Might not be very future-proof

Interpreters for JS, Microtontrollers, .Net , Java & others

It is best suited for scripting, but so are many other languages

Has features of both high and low level language

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Advanced community projects

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

It's really simple

Python environments can become a total unusable mess

Static typing via mypy

Unflexible userbase

Best chances of earning most money

Glue language, not production ready

Good introduction to data structures

Hard to debug other people's code

One right way to do things

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Active and helpful community

Error handling

Import Turtle

Libraries are not professionally developed, but they are bug prone, with significant feature overlap among them, and too many of them

Your tool for easy prototyping

Limited support for functional programming

The do it all of programming languages

Assignment

Mobile versions