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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82 Options Considered

Best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages	Price	Current stable version	Site
89 Nim	-	1.4.4	https://nim-lang.org
82 Smalltalk	-	6.1	-
80 Haskell	-	-	https://www.haskell.org/
80 Clojure	-	1.10.1	www.clojure.org
77 Rust	-	1.4.0	-

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score 111 · Answer 1

Nim

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score 95 · 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

See All

score 60 · Answer 3

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

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

Very difficult learning process

Top Pro

Forces you to learn pure functional programming

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

See All

score 65 · Answer 4

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

See All

score 89 · Answer 5

Rust

While not as verbose as Java, it still is much more verbose than languages like Go and Python. This means that the code is very explicit and easy to understand. See More

See All

score 27 · Answer 6

Elm

Top Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests. See More

Top Con

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

VigorousEnlil's Experience

I now use elm exclusively for all frontend development projects, large and small, and am not looking back. With immutability, static typing, a refreshingly simple syntax, and great compiler messages, programming in elm is pure joy. See More

Specs

Current stable version:0.19

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

Price:Open Source

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

Elixir

Top Pro

Very friendly functional language

Top Con

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Since Elixir 1.9.0 releases are built into Mix (The language's build tool) providing easy assembly for deployment See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.11.2

Site:https://elixir-lang.org

Price:Open source (Free)

See All

score 120 · Answer 8

Python

score 25 · Answer 9

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

TrustworthyBritomartis's Experience

OCaml combines what is arguably the safest type system out there with a no-nonsense compiler that makes performance easy to reason about and optimize. It combines the best of functional, imperative, and OO features into a language that is safe, simple, fast language. 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

score 3 · Answer 10

Zig

Top Pro

Performance

Zig is pretty fast, in some cases even faster than C. See More

Top Con

Almost no community

Specs

Current stable version:0.7.0

Site:https://ziglang.org/

License:MIT

Scheme

Add Video or Image

All

23

GNU/Linux, OS X, and Windows versions available. See More

See All

score 32 · 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

License:Apache 2.0

C#

Top Pro

Helps with catching bugs early because it's statically typed

Being a statically typed language, it helps a lot with catching potential bugs in compile-time. See More

Top Con

.NET stack lock-in

The tooling, the libraries, the frameworks etc. mostly is either created from and / or for Windows / Microsoft. Crossplatform development with C# is not fluent and until recently not official. See More

RealisticAnat's Experience

Wonderful language, a joy to work with. See More

Specs

Current stable version:8.0

Price:Free, Open Source

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

82 Options Considered

Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

My Recommendation for Nim

Runtime speed

Community is too small

Compiles to C or JavaScript

Unstable ecosystem

Powerful metaprogramming

Learning resources for beginners are scarse

Easy to read

Strict typing

Async/await features

Open source

Awesome syntax

Compile-time execution

Garbage-collected

Multi paradigm

Really crossplatform

Built-in Unicode support

Type inferencing

Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)

Great metaprogramming features

Easy to integrate with another languages

Has built-in async support

Has built-in unittest module

Optional and pluggable GC

Really cross-platform

More productive than Go, Rust and Python

Flexible memory management

Active development

Type interferencing

It produces executible files which are not large

Statically typed

Smalltalk

My Recommendation for Smalltalk

My Recommendation for Smalltalk

Live programming environments available

Not used as much anymore

Simple syntax

Isolation

Smalltalk amenable to creating domain-specific languages

Not common

Very nice and active community around Pharo, Squeak and Cuis

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

Object Oriented

Only one paradigm allowed

Provides powerful metaprogramming facilities

Limited libraries to connect with external services

Fun to use

Limited object system

Superb Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Virtual machine in its own isolated world

Environment of live objects

A little slow

Elegant syntax fits on a postcard

Simple, but not C-like syntax

First-class functions with lexical closures

Agile "interactive" test-driven development

Easy to learn and experiment

Inspector makes objects transparent

With PharoJS, easy to generate code for the web

With SqueakJS, run in the browser

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

Language uniformity

Pure and easy object orientation

Open source

Internal source code and documentation

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

Provides a functional way to interact with objects

It invented a lot of stuff

Incremental compilation

Graphical user interface

Save and restore virtual machine image

Inspired many other languages' object systems

The summum environment for code reuse!

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

The true Smalltalk- 80 Dynabook experience on Cuis.

Powerful integrated debugger