What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?

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What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?

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May 24, 2020

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81 Options Considered

Best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Site
88 Nim	-	1.2.0	https://nim-lang.org
85 Smalltalk	-	6.1	-
83 Python	-	3.8.1 and 2.7.16	-
82 Scheme	-	-	-
82 Elixir	-	1.9.4	https://elixir-lang.org

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score 74 · Answer 1

Nim

Has a static type system with great type inference and safety See More

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score 92 · Answer 2

Smalltalk

Top Pro

Live programming environments available

VisualWorks, Pharo, Squeak, Dolphin, Cuis See More

Top Con

Not used as much anymore

Arie van Wingerden's Experience

Done a lot of programming in S/370 Assembler, Rexx, Basic, Go, Rust, Rebol, Erlang, Lisp and Scheme variants. What burdens me is that every single project you must start from almost nothing. Reusability of code is often not possible. In Smalltalk that is totally different. Code reuse is the standard. See More

Specs

Current stable version:6.1

Top Pro

Code rewriting to program yourself out of a corner again

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score 117 · Answer 3

Python

Top Pro

Zen of Python

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ See More

Top Pro

Type hinting

The current version of Python has built-in syntax for both function and variable annotations--for optional static (compile-time) typing via third-party tools like mypy and PyCharm IDE. See More

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score 32 · Answer 4

Scheme

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Scheme syntax is extremely regular and easy to pick up. A formal specification of the syntax fits onto just a few pages; it can be introduced informally in a paragraph or two. Students are not distracted by remembering how to write if statements or loops or even operator precedence because every syntactic follows the same pattern. Ultimately, everything looks something like this: (func a b c) This includes not only user-defined functions but even control flow: (if cond then-clause else-clause) or even primitive operations like define and set: (define foo 10) (set! foo 11) This means that nothing really has special syntactic treatment in the language. There are essentially no weird edge-cases to memorize, and different concepts are given a more equal weight in the language. (Unlike Algol-like languages which tend to given undue weight to loops and assignment statements, for example.) See More

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score 55 · Answer 5

Elixir

Top Pro

Great for concurrency

Leverages the existing Erlang Beam VM which is amazing for concurrency. See More

Top Con

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Specs

Current stable version:1.9.4

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Price:Open source (Free)

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score 80 · Answer 6

Rust

Top Pro

Memory Safety

Rust is designed to prevent null pointers and segfaults. See More

Top Con

Terrible compile-time management

MemorableTitias's Experience

Great alternative to C++, just needs more libraries, which I'm sure are soon to come, with Mozilla working on it! See More

Specs

The biggest community contributing to language. See More

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score 55 · Answer 7

Clojure

Top Pro

Game is available with which you can learn Clojure

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

Top Pro

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

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

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score 52 · Answer 8

Haskell

Top Pro

Statically typed

Haskell's type system is extremely expressive. Often, it is clear how a function should be used from only looking at its type signature. Thanks to full type inference, this seldom gets in your way though and there's generally no need to declare the type of any local variables. See More

Top Con

Very difficult learning process

For people unfamiliar with functional programming, it's a difficult language to learn. See More

FriendlyEucleia's Experience

Easy and clear syntax, especially on the type level See More

Specs

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

Paradigm:functional

Type System:static

Top Pro

Type Level Computation

One is able to use the type system to induce much more interesting sorts of functional polymorphism than a language which doesn't have this feature can at compile time. 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 Pro

Well-suited for test-driven development

QuickCheck can generate automatic test cases, using the types of a function's arguments to decide what values are relevant. The functional paradigm makes it easy to formulate what equalities a some code should fulfill. See More

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score 42 · Answer 9

Kotlin

Top Pro

Amazing IDE support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. See More

Top Con

The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.3

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

Common Lisp

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

Top Pro

Powerful type system and data type support

Common Lisp is strongly typed; implementations like SBCL allow for (optional) static typing, and the type system is powerful, allowing for complex type definitions, as well as a good struct system and a superb class system (CLOS). Additionally, the support for various data types is exemplary -- allowing for rational numbers, arbitrary-length integers, arbitrary-length floats, complex numbers, bitwise manipulation, etc. See More

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score 24 · Answer 11

Julia

Top Pro

Nice regular syntax

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

Top Con

Young language with limited support

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

Ramaraju Kunadharaju's Experience

For computational methods much faster than MATLAB and Python See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.4

Site:julialang.org

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD

Type Model:Dynamically Typed

Top Pro

Python interop

Julia's PyCall can use Python modules about as easily as Python can. See More

Top Con

1-based array and column major

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

Amin Ya's Experience

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

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Answer 12

F#

Top Pro

Clean succinct syntax

F#'s syntax tends to be terse while remaining very readable and easy to understand without being a chore to write. See More

Top Con

Not really cross platform

Though the community sites are touting F# can be cross platform through use of Mono, the reality is that it is more of a hack to replay on larger mono applications in production. See More

EfficientLyssa's Experience

can write Unity Functionnaly See More

Specs

Current stable version:4.1

Site:http://www.fsharp.org

License:Apache 2.0

IDE Support:Visual Studio, Code, Rider

Top Pro

Type providers for statically type checked data access

Top Pro

Many advanced (functional) features

Top Pro

Multiplatform, it runs on .Net Core

Forget Xamarin and Mono. F# now runs on the multiplatform .Net Core! See More

Top Pro

.NET Interoperability

Since F# runs on the Common Language Runtime or CLR, it has access to the entire .NET Framework, as well as libraries written in other .NET languages such as C#, VB.NET, and C++/CLI. See More

Top Pro

Fall into the pit of success

F# directs you into a workflow where the right way is the path of least resistance. Coming from a C# background, its restrictions might feel arbitrary at first (e.g., what do you mean my code has to be in dependency order!? Arbitrary alphabetical or bust!), but you'll soon realize that your code is cohesive, concise and consistent in a way that it never was before - and you can compile and run with confidence! See More

What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?

81 Options Considered

Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Runtime speed

Community is too small

Powerful metaprogramming

Just an extra layer

Compiles to C or JavaScript

Async/await features

Easy to read

Awesome syntax

Open source

Strict typing

Multi paradigm

Garbage-collected

Built-in Unicode support

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Really crossplatform

Easy to integrate with another languages

Type interferencing

Compile-time execution

Has built-in async support

Great metaprogramming features

Has built-in unittest module

Really cross-platform

Flexible memory management

Statically typed

Smalltalk

My Recommendation for Smalltalk

My Recommendation for Smalltalk

Live programming environments available

Not used as much anymore

Object Oriented

Isolation

Provides powerful metaprogramming facilities

Not common

Simple syntax

Only one paradigm allowed

Smalltalk amenable to creating domain-specific languages

Language design and implementation makes it difficult to utilize multi-core systems

Very nice and active community around Pharo, Squeak and Cuis

Limited libraries to connect with external services

Fun to use

Limited object system

Rich libraries including many powerful data types, collections, frameworks, development tools etc.

Virtual machine in its own isolated world

Allows programming at various levels of abstraction, including with pure domain concepts

A little slow

Powerful integrated debugger

Simple, but not C-like syntax

Superb Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Environment of live objects

The true Smalltalk- 80 Dynabook experience on Cuis.

Easy to learn and experiment

Agile "interactive" test-driven development

First-class functions with lexical closures

Elegant syntax fits on a postcard

Inspector makes objects transparent

With SqueakJS, run in the browser

With PharoJS, easy to generate code for the web

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

Language uniformity

Pure and easy object orientation

Internal source code and documentation

Open source

Graphical user interface

Incremental compilation

It invented a lot of stuff

Provides a functional way to interact with objects

Save and restore virtual machine image

With Amber, easy to generate code to run in the web browser

Inspired many other languages' object systems

The summum environment for code reuse!

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

Tooling emerges, cheaply, as a consequence of its design rather than being bolted on

Code rewriting to program yourself out of a corner again

Python

My Recommendation for Python