What are the best languages for writing command line utilities?

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What are the best languages for writing command line utilities?

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Jan 29, 2024

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20 Options Considered

Best languages for writing command line utilities	Price	Current stable version	Platforms
59 Python	-	3.9.1	Windows, Linux, macOS, AIX, IBM i, iOS, z/OS, Solaris, VMS
53 Nim	-	2.0.0	Windows, MacOS/iOS, Linux /Android/Termux, *BSD, Solaris/SmartOS, HaikuOS, lots of others
53 Golang	Free	1.21.0	Windows, Linux, Mac etc.
-- JavaScript	-	-	-
-- V	Free	-	Windows, Linux, Mac

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score 54 · Answer 1

Python

Top Pro

Clear and easy to read 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

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 slower than Java. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.9.1

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

GZipped size:22.5MB

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

See All Specs

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

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

Top Pro

Great community of passionate developers

The large community of Python developers has led to a wealth of tutorials and open source projects and libraries on the Internet. This means that when someone is stuck or is having an unexplained error in their code, most likely there is a StackOverflow answer or a tutorial out there which can solve that very issue. See More

Top Con

Division between v2 and v3

There are noticeable differences between Python2 and Python3. They are mainly related to the syntax and library support. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Write once at high level and python sorts out the details through its batteries included. 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

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

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

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

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

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

Universal

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

Rigid style guidelines

Lack of curly braces and enforced spacing rules limit a teams ability to enforce their own spacing requirements and makes the code look more like a batch script. 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

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

Top Pro

Comes with a text-based live interpreter

Python comes with a text-based live interpreter out of the box, which helps developers test and debug their code in real time and while they are writing it. See More

Top Con

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Once 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

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

Unflexible userbase

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad for games

Python has a lot of frameworks like pygame, but exporting the game is hard and building files like .exe gets very large and have a bad performance on bad computers. 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

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

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

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

Has features of both high and low level language

It is somewhere between C and Java. 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

Import Turtle

Do something visually interesting in minutes by using the turtle standard library package. 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

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

It's really simple

It's very simple for understanding how programming works. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 to learn, more to go

It is very easy to learn and it has community support and many categories available. 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 for new users and experienced programmers

If you can get over whitespace formatting. See More

See All

score 27 · Answer 2

Nim

Top Pro

Strict typing

Checks your code at compile time. See More

Top Con

You won't get a job programming Nim

It's not a mainstream language. 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:2.0.0

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

GZipped size:14,2 MB

License:MIT

See All Specs

Top Pro

Feels high-level, works low-level

While Nim syntactically heavily resembles languages like Python, it compiles to native code. This means it feels more like a high level language in many ways but for the most part achieves near-C levels of performance. See More

Top Con

Generics are a mess

Confused mishmash of conflicting ideas. See More

MemorableJumis's Experience

Con artists pushing this false hype language on tricked Python addicts and on here. Nobody know this language, not even on TIOBE index. You not getting a job with this. Nobody need this language, not even for hobby, as others much better. See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with another languages

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

Top Con

Memory management confusion

Multiple choices of garbage collection, which is causing confusion, and nothing works particularly well. See More

DebonairAnbay's Experience

Slant's rankings are complete trash. Clearly Nim is given special treatment, where none of it's 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

Has built-in async support

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

Top Con

Jack of all trades, master of none

As the creator of Zig has been rumored to say, a language needs to be really good at something in particular. Nim isn't, better to use something else. See More

Live Wire's Experience

I still write a lot of quick scripts in Python, but am turning to Nim more and more. What a great, tiny, extremely fast little language, and I don't have worry about virtualenv or if the pip dependency I'm looking for was installed on the other system, or even if pip is installed on the other system! And, Nim's compile-time checks eliminate lots of possible errors that can sneak into longer Python scripts. 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 Con

No big name backer

Mostly unknown language that's not even on TIOBE's index top 100 nor has any big name corporate support. See More

Top Pro

Clean and readable syntax

Nim removes a lot of visual bloat like curly braces and semicolons to make its code clearer and more compact. Whitespace is significant in Nim, which enforces good coding practices like proper and consistent indentation. See More

Top Con

UFCS and Case/underscore insensitivity

Nim's philosophy on syntax seems more lenient than disciplined. UFCS (Uniform Function Call Syntax) introduces multiple, equivalent ways to call a function, and case/underscore insensitivity means that the compiler permits inconsistency in symbol names. 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 Con

Atrocious error messages

Unhelpful to users, wasting hours deciphering and extremely annoying. 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

Failed wannabe Python knockoff language

Created in 2008, Nim has failed to make TIOBE top 100 or PYPL rankings for programming languages. Pythoners can use alternatives like Cython for a more Python-like experience. 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 Con

Whitespace sensitive language

Creates unnecessary errors, eye strain, and ugliness. 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 you real-time application or a game. See More

Top Con

Weird thread model

Not turned on by default. Has very odd and convoluted rules on memory sharing between threads. Harder to use. See More

Top Pro

Really cross-platform

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

Top Con

Inconsistent name formatting

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

Top Pro

Built-in Unicode support

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

Top Con

Lacks void / null safety

Easy to get involved in safety issues. See More

Top Pro

Really crossplatform

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

Top Con

Con artist pushed useless language

False hype con artist language pushed on tricked Python addicts to make cash. Nobody need this language, not even for hobby, others much better. See More

Top Pro

Type interferencing

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

Top Pro

Multi paradigm

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

Top Pro

Compile-time execution

Nim has 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

See All

score 34 · Answer 3

Golang

Top Pro

Go programs compile to native executables

Top Con

Package management is clunky

Since it's inception, Go has suffered from poor package management. Many attempts to improve the situation have been made, but none approach the quality of package management found in other languages. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No forms designer

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

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

Distribution is easy

Since Go is a compiled language, binaries can be precompiled for each OS that the developer wants to support. 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

Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming

Simply prepend a function with go to execute it concurrently. Utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing threads effortless. The maximum number of threads to use may be defined at compile time, even if that is limiting goroutines to run on one thread. See More

Top Con

Uses structs for almost everything

Most modern languages use dictionaries, maps, or hashes to create complex data structures. Golang's use of struct feel like a giant step backwards into the beginning days of C. 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

Compiler is fast

While the Go compiler is indeed fast, Google achieves this speed by compromising the robustness of the compiler itself. In other words, it skips checks that it should do. 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

JSON parsing is extremely slow compared to other languages

JSON has become one of the most widely used standards for formatting data. Golang's JSON parsing is slow and causes delays in programs that handle a lot of JSON. See More

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

Go's concurrency model is bloated

Spawning processes in Go takes about 10 times the memory of more efficient languages, like Erlang and Elixir. 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

Still new language without a large following

Go is still a relatively new language which does not have the following that other widely used languages have. So it can be a little hard to find guides or tutorials or even libraries written in Go. 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

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

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

Expects prior familiarity with tooling, "advanced" OS use

A standard step of even installing Go is modifying your path -- a person who's encountering their first language might not even understand. It's hard to escape using Go without familiarity with using build tools, managing and organizing project directories, etc. It's not as simple as Python's "just run the .py file with the interpreter." 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

Requires specific directory structure and environment variable settings

Too much knowledge required for a first programming language. 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 its 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

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

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

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

Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages

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

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

Does not support circular dependencies

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

Top Con

Concurrency has some issues

Concurrency in Go is handled in shared memory, instead private, isolated memory. Also, Go processes are not guaranteed to release control to other processes, which can cause problems in concurrent systems. 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

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

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

See All

score 16 · Answer 4

JavaScript

Top Pro

Lots of libraries for CLI

Top Con

Weak standard library

Simple function that should be included in the standard library aren't. See More

Benjamin Philippe's Experience

JavaScript works just fine for command line utilities as it can be fairly compact using good libraries. The inconviences of using the strange JavaScript types and operators is countered by it's enornmous ecosystem. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

Minimum Supported ECMAScript Version:ECMAScript 6 (Node v4.x-v10.x)

ECMAScript Modules:Available (as a flag) (only on Node 8.x-10.x)

See All Specs

Top Pro

Async/await makes for easy concurrency

Top Con

Too much flexibility in JS can lead to a lot of refactoring as utilities take shape

Top Pro

Massive ecosystem

JavaScript has one of the largest programming ecosystems, as shown by the being the most popular language for projects on GitHub. As there are so many projects written in JavaScript there are lots of libraries available to build off of and many of them are written to be easy to use and integrate into other projects. There are also lots of resources available for learning JavaScript. Other than traditional tutorials, language learning sites such as Codecademy have JavaScript courses. The Mozilla Developer Database also serves as a great resource for learning about the standard libraries built into JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Sometimes slow to start-up

Nodejs module loading or Java (Rhino/Nashorn) cold start, can feel slow to start compared to compiled tools like Go. See More

Top Pro

JS is flexible and allows for quick solutions and easy refactoring

Top Con

Not designed for parallelism

Parallelism generally means being able to do multiple actions at the same time in hardware. That usually requires semantics for forking threads, managing memory, and preventing or reasoning about race conditions. While Javascript has WebWorkers in the browser that communicate via message passing, has creative native modules for threading in nodejs, can use Java's parallelism in rhino/nashorn/truffle, and recently has gained shared buffers and Atomics; It wasn't designed for parallelism and the language lacks semantics to help, compared to other modern languages with parallelism in mind. This makes writing parallel code in JS difficult to reason about, and much less performant than functionally equivalent alternatives and/or non-portable implementation specific (e.g.: jvm based). See More

Top Pro

Utilities easily ported/expanded to the web, mobile, and desktop.

Top Con

Many errors pass silently

JavaScript looks for every possible way to treat the code you write as runnable and is very reluctant to point out likely errors. For example, you have call a function with too many arguments, the extra arguments are simply discarded. See More

Top Pro

Runs on both the browser and the server

With Node.js, it is now possible to run JavaScript as a web server. This would allow you to be able to create server based applications sooner than would if you had to learn a separate programming language as well for server side code. As JavaScript is the only language supported by web browsers it puts it in the unique situation of being the only programming language that's available on both the client side and server side. See More

Top Con

Easy to accidentally use globals

If you forget a var or new, you can clobber the global scope. For tiny scripts (JavaScript's original use case) globals are great, but for larger applications globals are generally regarded as a Bad Thing. This is because changes to one small part of a program can randomly break things anywhere else. These kinds of bugs are notoriously hard to find. See More

Top Pro

First-class functions with lexical closures

While certainly not the only language with these features, this pro alone is so powerful that it compensates for most of JavaScript's problems. You'll learn to use closures and higher-order functions well in JavaScript, because you have to. And then you can generalize this knowledge to any other language that has these, and the good ones do. See More

Top Con

Weird type coercions

'5' - 1 == 4, but '5' + 1 == 51. There are other examples that make even less sense. See More

Top Pro

Very good debugger

Has a built in debugger with break points, watches that work on local values, and a console that you can use to edit anything at any time. Both in the browser (eg: Chrome), and server (eg: Nodejs). See More

Top Con

The "this" keyword doesn't mean what you think it means

this is bound to whatever object called the function. Unless you invoke it as a method. Unless you invoke it as a constructor. Unless it's an arrow function. See More

Top Pro

JSON is native to JS

JSON is arguably a "must-learn". With JS, that's one less additional syntax to learn. See More

Top Con

Fractured community

The JavaScript community is fractured. Instead of trying to make exceptional tools and libraries, they waste their time reinventing the wheel every other week. This systemic problem is due to the inherent weakness of the language itself. See More

Top Pro

Great tools for development

Flow, JSHint/ESLint, Babel, npm, etc. See More

Top Pro

Modern ESNext is far better than the JS of days past

Modern JS has made great strides, and can be targerted to older (or non-standard) browsers using Babel. There are new language constructs that can make programming in JS comfortable.; e.g.: async / await ( <3 ). See More

Top Pro

Integrates very well with UE4

Coding an immersive 3D game can retain the attention of new programmers. ncsoft/Unreal.js. See More

Top Pro

High demand for JavaScript developers

If you're looking for a career as a developer, JavaScript is the place to focus your attention. There is a huge demand for good developers especially in frameworks such as React and Angular. See More

Top Pro

Speed (most implementations)

JS/ES is in the running for the fastest interpreted language given the optimizations and JIT integration of popular implementations. On the other hand, it fails utterly when compared with compiled (to native or VM code) languages. See More

Top Pro

Prototype based Object Oriented System

Being object oriented, it supports the predominate and powerful programming approach. Being prototype based, it provides an intuitive approach to OOP. Whereas other popular languages use classes, which focus on thinking in the abstract, Javascript's prototypes allow you to focus on thinking in the concrete. For example, in a prototypical language, you think of a rectangle, and define it. You now have a rectangle. Let's say you want a red rectangle, you copy the rectangle and give it the property red. Want a blue one? Copy rectangle again give it a blue. Big blue rectangle? Copy blue rectangle and make it big. In a class-based language, first you describe a rectangle, describe a red rectangle as a type of rectangle, describe blue and big blue rectangles, and now that you have described them, you must create instances of them, and only then do you have the rectangles. Essentially: Classes are factories for objects, prototypes are objects themselves, and the latter method was created to be more intuitive, which is particularly advantageous to beginners. See More

Top Pro

Atwood's Law "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

May also be a con. See More

Top Pro

Can be very simple (teachable)

By setting a few ground-rules (effectively coding in a subset of JS), JS is one of the simplest languages to learn (requiring very few must-learn prerequisite concepts). See More

Top Pro

Several Platforms to use the web stack and JS to create multi-platform apps

Opens the door to native application development as well as just websites. Use with React Native, Weex or Quasar (Vue), PhoneGap or Cordova, NativeScript... (etc) to build native apps. Use mostly the same code base for multi-platform and web. See More

Top Pro

Complete dev stack can be run online

With codepen.io and other prototyping tools, you can learn Javascript from a mobile device. You don't even need a computer. It can be learned from an internet cafe or public library. See More

Top Pro

Instant gratification

While it's easy to argue that Python will give you instant gratification, JavaScript is far better in this regard. Make a small change to a page and it's immediately visible in the browser. You can throw in a JavaScript library like jQuery with minimal fuss. See More

Top Pro

C-like syntax

After learning Javascript, you will feel at home in other languages as C-like syntax is very common. See More

Top Pro

Easy to build an application

By using the UI capabilities in HTML and CSS you can develop substantial applications with graphical interfaces more quickly and with less effort than in other languages which would require you to learn a windowing library. Building a useful application is one of the best ways to learn a new language and because of the low learning curve for creating applications you can create more substatial programs and learn more practical programming priciple faster. See More

Top Pro

No installation required

If you run a web browser you already have JavaScript installed and can get started right away. Modern browsers such as Chrome also have very powerful programming consoles built into them. Aside from the browser console, you can also use online Javascript playgrounds such as JS Bin and JS Fiddle. Even from a tablet. See More

Top Pro

Required for web development

If you are looking to create web projects, you will have to learn Javascript in order to develop the client side code. If you learn the foundations of programming in JavaScript you can reapply that education later in building web applications. See More

See All

score 14 · Answer 5

V

Top Pro

High readability

Easy to read and understand language. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

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

Typing discipline:Strong, static, inferred, structural

Paradigm:Multi-paradigm: procedural, object-oriented, concurrent

See All Specs

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Compile to many OSes. See More

Top Pro

C Interop

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

Top Pro

Simplicity

V is simple and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Highly understandable language. See More

Top Pro

Safety

V is very safe. See More

Top Pro

Fast like C

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

Top Pro

Generics

V has generics. See More

Top Pro

Sum types

V has sum types. 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

Supports concurrency and channels

Can run functions concurrently that communicate over channels. See More

Top Pro

Inline assembly

Can add Assembly code. See More

Top Pro

Closures

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

Top Pro

Fast compile times

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

See All

score 9 · Answer 6

C

Top Pro

Fast and efficient

C is mostly used for fast and efficient programs. It's relatively low level (it's actually a high-level language, but compared to other languages used today it's actually a low level language) helps to create fast and efficient programs. See More

Top Con

Complicated and very easy to create bugs and memory leaks

While the ability to allocate memory at will is very powerful and allows for efficient code, in the hands of a non experienced programmer it can become dangerous and can lead to memory leaks. See More

Benjamin Philippe's Experience

C is great for CLIs because it can do the low level things simple things can need. Was used to write the Linux command line utilities. See More

Specs

Current stable version:C'18

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

Typing discipline:static

Paradigm:imperative

See All Specs

Top Pro

Extremely 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 and Mac) 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 for certain individual cases, as well. 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

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, I would recommend 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

More control over the code

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 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

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

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

Requires memory management

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

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

Low level of abstraction

While higher level languages like Java and Python provide possibilities to be "more expressive" per line of code, it's much more convenient to start with a "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

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

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

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

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

Isn't truly portable or cross platform

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

Top Pro

C is simple with fewer 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 12 · Answer 7

Bash

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities

BASH scripting is a rich and robust language. See More

Top Con

Extremely complicated and inconsistent rules

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

Julian Honma's Experience

Too low-level. String manipulation is quite bothersome. No hashmap/associative arrays unless you use Bash 4+. See More

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

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

Top Con

One of the most dangerous languages around

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

Top Pro

Plenty of examples and tutorials

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

Top Con

Non-intuitive shell expansion in for loops

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

Top Pro

Default shell on most systems

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

Top Con

No out-of-the-box command autocompletion

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

Top Pro

Variables and aliases are listed the way they are built

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

Top Con

Lags behind on features compared to ZSH and Fish

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

See All

score 5 · Answer 8

Dart

All

1

Specs

Current stable version:2.1.0

Standard:ECMA

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

score 12 · Answer 9

Rust

Top Con

Low readability

Harder to read and understand language. See More

Top Pro

Wonderful memory management system with 100% memory safety, without a garbage collector

This results in very fast performance and ease of use. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, MacOS

CPU:Intel Core i7-3770

Steam Rating:Very Positive

OS:Windows 7 64bit

See All Specs

Top Con

Very ugly and verbose syntax

Compared to many other languages, hard to grok and be productive, when dealing with annoying and ugly syntax. See More

Top Con

Must battle with the compiler

The compiler is suppose to be helpful, not your enemy. See More

Top Con

Rust not as safe as it pretends to be

Rust problems: 1) Massive undisclosed usage of unsafe. 2) Massive amounts of memory safety CVEs - see details. 3) Large bloated Rust binaries increase attack surface for exploits. 4) Many corporate types claiming Rust is safe, don't actually program or use it (have some quiet financial interest to push it). See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 10

Pascal / Object Pascal

Top Pro

Understanding of basics

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

Specs

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

Top Pro

Clear syntax

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

Top Pro

Incredible GUI design tools

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

Top Pro

Easy

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

Top Pro

Enforces good programming practice

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

Top Pro

Tons of academic reading

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

Top Pro

Still active

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

Top Pro

Cross platform

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

Top Pro

Language depth

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

Top Pro

Rich existing libraries

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

Top Pro

Extensive third party libraries

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

Top Pro

Flexible

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

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

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

Top Pro

Easy GUI creation

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

Top Pro

Available on a ridiculous number of platforms

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

Top Pro

Fast compilation

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

Top Pro

Suitably close to modern languages, without the pitfalls

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

Top Pro

Excellent database development

See All

score 9 · Answer 11

Perl

Top Con

Hard to decipher

Top Pro

Native and powerful regex engine

Top Con

Too much syntactic sugars

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Top Pro

Tons of modules (CPAN)

Top Pro

Powerful string matching abilities

Top Pro

Very fast execution time

Usually 5 times faster than Python and 10 times TCL. See More

Top Pro

Very fast excecution time

usually 5 times faster than Python and 10 times TCL See More

Top Pro

Interface to all of POSIX routines

Top Pro

Large community (forums, irc)

See All

score 5 · Answer 12

Ruby

Top Con

Distributing a Ruby program is not that easy

While Ruby libraries and apps are distributed using Rubygems, they are intended to be used by Ruby developers or "Rubyists". In order to distribute a CLI made in Ruby to everyone, even those people who do not use Ruby developers need to compile a custom version of Ruby to distribute with each installer. After that's done, every gem that the application needs to run is needed to be installed on the user's computer and this can break things if there are some gems that have to rely on native libraries to function. See More

Top Pro

Easily extensible via meta-programming

Ruby allows programmers to easily inject new functionality into existing, core classes. For example, if you want to have a function that takes a string and returns a boolean, depending on whether or not the string is a palindrome, you can add that to the standard library's String class for your project, allowing you to call String.palindrome?("level") and have it return true. This can be abused, of course, and should be used wisely; however, it can also make your code consistent and easy to read. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.6.0

GZipped size:15.9 MB

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

Top Pro

Elegant syntax

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end See More

Top Con

Viewed as a web development language

Despite its flexibility and performance, Ruby is often seen as being unsuitable for other tasks by those who are not familiar with it. As such, a lot of discussion about it centers around Rails, which is not at all relevant if you're using Ruby for something else, such as game development. See More

Top Pro

A Large Ecosystem of tools & libraries

Ruby has a large ecosystem of tools and libraries for just about every use. Such as ORMs (Active Record, DatabMapper), Web Application Frameworks(Rails, Sinatra, Volt), Virtualization Orchestration(docker-api, drelict), CLI tools(Thor, Commando), GUI Frameworks(Shoes, FXRuby) and the list goes on. If you can think of it, there is probably a gem for that ( and if not you can create your own and share with the community). See More

Top Con

Dynamic type system

Majority of bugs could be resolved with types. See More

Top Pro

Large community of developers

Ruby has a large community of followers, most of which are more than welcoming to new-comers to the language and willing to help. See More

Top Con

More than one way to do it

A problem inspired by Perl. The core API interfaces are bloated. There's at least four different ways to define methods. More is not always better. Sometimes it's just more. See More

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 Con

No docstrings

It's hard to access Ruby's documentation from the REPL (irb), unlike Python, Lisp, and Smalltalk which let you ask functions how to use them, which is a great benefit to the beginner, and which also encourages you to document your program as you code it. See More

Top Con

Monkeypatching

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

Top Con

Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class. In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times. See More

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 13

Haskell

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

Specs

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

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

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

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

Top Con

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

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

Obscure ugly notation

0 = 1 Using "=" like this: <code> -- Using recursion (with pattern matching) factorial 0 = 1 factorial n = n * factorial (n - 1) </code> Example from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language) is quite simply annoying aesthetics. See More

Top Pro

Powerful Categorical Abstractions

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

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

See All

score 2 · Answer 14

Swift

Top Con

Bad String Interpolation

String Interpolation not as strong as in other scripting languages like in Python. See More

Top Pro

Professional tooling and easy shipping

Easy to ship and a wide variety of packages available (cross-platform). See More

Specs

Platforms:Mac, Linux

Top Con

Too Apple centric

Not so cross-platform. See More

Top Pro

Backed by Apple

Top Pro

Low memory footprint due to reference counting

Top Pro

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

Top Pro

Performance speed comparable to native C

Top Pro

Modern syntax

See All

score 1 · Answer 15

Tcl

Top Pro

Tk and Expect

Tk is a graphical user interface toolkit with bindings for Python, C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Go, Java, Haskell and more, see Languages with a Tk binding and GUI Scripting with Tcl/Tk. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Rich scripting capabilities on a single line

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

Top Pro

Standalone packages

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

Top Pro

Cross-platform

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

Top Pro

Widely available

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

Top Pro

Standard library

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

See All

score 1 · Answer 16

D

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

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

EnchantingBebinn's Experience

So many other newer languages that rather use or try. See More

Specs

Current stable version:2.101.2

Site:https://dlang.org/

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

Top Pro

Comes with std.ggetopt to parse command line options.

See https://dlang.org/phobos/std_getopt.html. The getopt module implements a getopt function, which adheres to the POSIX syntax for command line options. GNU extensions are supported in the form of long options introduced by a double dash ("--"). Support for bundling of command line options, as was the case with the more traditional single-letter approach, is provided but not enabled by default. See More

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

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

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 read and understand code

See All

score 2 · Answer 17

Crystal

Top Con

Not mature yet

Language is still young. See More

Top Pro

Very easy bindings to existing C libraries

Specs

Site:https://crystal-lang.org/

Top Con

Not many third party libraries available yet

Top Pro

Compiles to native code

Native efficiency. See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 18

C++

Top Pro

Powerful memory management

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

Top Con

Memory leaks and segmentation faults

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

Specs

Standard: ISO/IEC 14882 or C++17

Engine:UE4 , Cocos-2d-x

Top Pro

Huge language which supports almost everything

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

Top Con

C++ succombs under its own weight

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

Top Pro

C code can be used in C++ code

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

Top Con

Module system is not great

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

Top Pro

Teaches fundamental OOP

Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

Painfully slow compilation

Beginners need fast feedback. See More

Top Pro

Excellent compiler optimization

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

Top Con

Tough to learn as the first language

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

Top Pro

Teaches problem solving

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

Top Con

Huge language gets in the way of learning

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

Top Pro

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

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

Top Con

Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety

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

Top Pro

Best way to understand algorithms

Top Con

Undefined behavior

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

Top Pro

Has lots of library

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

Top Con

Suffers from fundamental design flaws of C and older C++ specifications

Due to attempting to be fully backward compatible, it continues to implement features on top of broken implementations of past concepts. In example, lack of type safety, poor memory management, lack of unit testing, lack of modules, and has the same fundamental problem of header files. See More

Top Pro

Universal, portable, best complexity/efficiency trade-off

Top Pro

STD is often updated

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

Top Pro

Faster execution of the same algorithms

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

Top 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

See All

score 4 · Answer 19

J

Top Con

Syntax is pure madness

quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#) See More

score 1 · Answer 20

ClojureScript

Top Pro

The Spec core library

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

Top Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:32 kB

Top Pro

Excellent build tools

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

Top Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Top Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

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

Top Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

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

Top Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

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

Top Pro

Simple syntax

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

Top Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

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

Top Pro

Excellent tools for web development

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

See All

What are the best languages for writing command line utilities?

20 Options Considered

Python

My Recommendation for Python

My Recommendation for Python

Clear and easy to read syntax

Speed can matter

Comes with extensive libraries

Significant whitespace

Great community of passionate developers

Division between v2 and v3

Cross-platform

Language fragmentation

Easy to get started

Inelegant and messy language design

Good documentation

Does not teach you about data types

Lots of tutorials

Too opinionated for a general-purpose programming language

Universal

Worst language design ever

Can be used in many domains

Rigid style guidelines

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

Not good for mobile development

Comes with a text-based live interpreter

The process of shipping/distributing software is reatively complicated

Active and helpful community

Unflexible userbase

Clear syntax

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

Best chances of earning most money

Hard to debug other people's code

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

Bad for games

Static typing via mypy

Version Confusion with V2.x and V3.x

Easy to find jobs

Limited support for functional programming

Has features of both high and low level language

Multi-threading can introduce unwanted complexity

Import Turtle

Might not be very future-proof

It's really simple

Abstraction to the point of hinderance

Good introduction to data structures

Supports various programming paradigms

Very similar to pseudo-code

One right way to do things

Advanced community projects

Includes pygame library

Easy to learn, More to Go

Easy to learn, more to go

Mobile versions

Easy for new users and experienced programmers

Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Strict typing

You won't get a job programming Nim

Feels high-level, works low-level

Generics are a mess

Easy to integrate with another languages

Memory management confusion

Has built-in async support

Jack of all trades, master of none

Great metaprogramming features

No big name backer

Clean and readable syntax

UFCS and Case/underscore insensitivity

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Atrocious error messages

Has built-in unittest module

Failed wannabe Python knockoff language

Easy to read

Whitespace sensitive language

Garbage-collected

Weird thread model

Really cross-platform

Inconsistent name formatting