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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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	-	0.20.0	https://nim-lang.org
85 Smalltalk	-	6.1	-
85 Elixir	-	1.8.1	https://elixir-lang.org
83 Python	-	3.7.3 and 2.7.16	-
82 Scheme	-	-	-

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score 47 · Answer 1

Nim

Top Pro

Statically typed

Has static type system with great type interference and safety See More

Top Con

Community is too small

Too small of a community to keep up with development of similar concurrent projects, like Haxe or Kotlin. See More

PrivateAhMuzenCab's Experience

Fast development, Fast execution, Easy to learn See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.20.0

Site:https://nim-lang.org

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

GZipped size:13 MB

NordVPN

Top Pro

Rated #1 VPN worldwide by Cnet & PCMag.com

100% security - no logs whatsoever
30-day money back guarantee
Blazing fast speed

Specs

Platforms:Windows, MacOS, Linux, IOS, Android
IPv6:Yes
Server locations:61
Based in:Panama

score 90 · Answer 2

Smalltalk

Top Pro

Live programming environments available

VisualWorks, Pharo, Squeak, Dolphin, Cuis See More

Top Con

Isolation

Smalltalk has its own world inside the image. You cannot use your current text editor with it. At least not in a straight forward way. See More

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

See All

score 48 · Answer 3

Elixir

Top Pro

Very friendly functional language

Top Con

Some design choices may seem strange

Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird: Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end or receive do {:hello, msg} -> msg {:world, msg} -> "won't match" end See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.8.1

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Price:Open source (Free)

See All

score 108 · Answer 4

Python

Top Pro

Comes with extensive libraries

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

Top Con

Bad parallelism

GIL See More

Romuald Texier-Marcadé's Experience

Great language and ecosystem for scientic computing, machine learning and data science. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.7.3 and 2.7.16

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

See All

score 26 · Answer 5

Scheme

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Scheme has far less built into the language itself, helping students see that things like OOP are not magical: they are just patterns for organizing code. Everything in Scheme is built up from a very small set of primitives which compose in a natural and intuitive fashion. Having a language that does not accord many things special status helps keep students open minded. This will help students later go between different languages and paradigms from procedural to object-oriented to functional. See More

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score 70 · Answer 6

Rust

Top Pro

Memory Safety

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

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Learning curve of the fairly complex rules for Ownership, References and Borrowing, and Lifetimes required. Their use must be internalized in order to become reasonably fluent in Rust. See More

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

Rust has built-in support for concurrency. See More

Top Pro

Error Handling

Rust forces the programmer to handle errors, but provides zero cost abstractions and syntactical niceties for this purpose. Error handling is fast, concise, and safe See More

Top Pro

Package manager (cargo) is extremely useful, builds are reproducible

Cargo can be used to manage libraries/library revisions, building rust code, building and linking C code, tool installation, text and benchmark execution... See More

Top Pro

Ha built-in support for concurrency

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score 45 · Answer 7

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

Basically has no foothold in industry

Nearly 30 years of existence and basically no application effectively in use. (Apart from some mini apps smuggled in by Haskell evangelists, that will disappear once they leave the company). Although, this is slowly changing in the last years. See More

EnterprisingRa's Experience

Concise and flexible syntax. Great for practicing functional programming concepts, techniques and abstractions, which would be obscured in other languages due to their clumsy and verbose sytnax. 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

Very difficult learning process

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

See All

score 35 · Answer 8

Clojure

Top Pro

Designed for concurrency

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

Top Con

Restrictive License

The Eclipse Public License is a fairly restrictive, complicated license with a lot of license compatibility issues. See More

ImaginativeVucubCaquix's Experience

Awesome See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.10

Site:www.clojure.org

Elm

Top Pro

Immutable values

The values in Elm are immutable - that is once assigned they cannot be changed. This makes it easier (especially for beginners) as values aren't constantly changing. See More

Top Con

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

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

Specs

Current stable version:0.19

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

Price:Open Source

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

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

See All

score 20 · Answer 10

Racket

Racket offers a sophisticated hygienic macro system in the Scheme tradition, with enhancements to support robust checking with ease. Combined with the #lang mechanism for extending the parser, Racket has groundbreaking support for DSLs and even full-fledged languages that cooperate as parts of larger programs. See More

See All

score 21 · Answer 11

Julia

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

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

Specs

Current stable version:1.0

Site:julialang.org

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD

Julia can call C functions directly (more or less). See More

See All

score 24 · 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

Specs

Current stable version:4.1

Site:http://www.fsharp.org

IDE Support:Visual Studio, Code, Rider

Kotlin

Top Pro

Java interoperability

Since it runs on the JVM, Kotlin is 100% interoperable with Java and can use existing Java frameworks and libraries. 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

OCaml

Top Pro

Encourages functional style

It steers you towards a functional style, but doesn't bother you with purity and "monads everywhere" like other languages, such as Haskell. See More

Top Con

Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows

Lacks native support for Windows systems. See More

Specs

Current stable version:4.0.7

Site:http://ocaml.org

Price:Open source (Free)

License:LGPL version 2.1

The merlin editor tool provides all you need to develop OCaml in your favourite editor. See More

See All

Answer 15

D

Top Pro

Extremely powerful user types

For example you can make your own type that behaves like a JavaScript variable (nice for using JSON based REST APIs) See More

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

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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

Statically typed

Community is too small

Runtime speed

Still in pre 1.0

Powerful metaprogramming

Async/await features

Compiles to C or JavaScript

Awesome syntax

Open source

Easy to read

Strict typing

Garbage-collected

Easy to integrate with another languages

Multi paradigm

Type interferencing

Really crossplatform

Has built-in async support

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Built-in Unicode support

Compile-time execution

Has built-in unittest module

Great metaprogramming features

Really cross-platform

Smalltalk

My Recommendation for Smalltalk

My Recommendation for Smalltalk

Live programming environments available

Isolation

Simple syntax

Not common

Smalltalk amenable to creating domain-specific languages

Not used as much anymore

Very nice and active community around Pharo, Squeak and Cuis

Limited libraries to connect with external services

Object Oriented

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

Provides powerful metaprogramming facilities

Limited object system

Fun to use

Only one paradigm allowed

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

Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir