FreeGameDev

I don't really have a favourite programming language, but I certainly have a most hated language:

PHP. PHP is a fractal of bad design.
There are plenty of reason to hate on PHP:

http://www.phpsadness.com/
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fr ... ad-design/
https://wiki.theory.org/index.php/YourL ... ks_because
https://blog.codinghorror.com/php-sucks ... nt-matter/
https://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/
https://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/
https://bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php/
https://www.tnx.nl/php.html

Preferred language: C++ (many years of C practice before)
Hated language: Ada and Tcl ! Tcl made me crazy several times.
In between, there are other languages that I find interesting and elegant like Python, PhP, Nasal, AngelScript.

There are plenty of reason to hate on PHP

Hmm... Maybe I've had too little experience with PHP, but as for "several small projects" I liked it much more than C++.

Most favorite: C
Favorite among script languages: Lua
Tolerable: shell script (bash)

Least favorite: Everything else.

Favorite: Scheme. I really like the design and I feel like the community is starting to become more cohesive lately.

Least favorite: None in particular, I dislike Javascript and PHP but I'm sure there are worse languages.

I am OK with C, Java, C#, and Python. They aren't the most "elegant" languages IMO but are useful and not as insane as Javascript or (especially) PHP.

Most: Python
Least: Java

I just love Python and C#

I use Gambas mostly because it is a great GUI design tool for Linux, and a very polished IDE, and it allows me to prototype things quickly. It is also basically VB without the cruft (and I started on VB 6).

Lately I have also tried out Lazarus and Free Pascal, and it is pretty cool, but not quite as intuitive or smooth as Gambas in my opinion.

Python is nice enough, but I simply can not find a nice way to make GUI applications in it. Have dabbled in C++ and JavaScript.

Can not say I have any languages that I hate. Different tools for different jobs.

My main gripe with Lazarus is that all the official FreePascal graphics libraries are available under more restrictive licenses than fpc. That really limits it for people from the Java world who expect it all to be part of one cohesive system.

As for the Pascal language, it's alright. I could take it or leave it.

Favourite: fig

Least favourite: PHP (not because it isn't leet, but because it was always a mess and is now more tedious than js or bash are on a bad day.)

I don't hate php coders-- if you can stand using it, props to you. I liked it once.

Okay, firstly let me give a shoutout to an amazing language you probably don't know: LIL.

http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/

It's a beautiful small minimalist interpreted language only in two files (C and H), extremely easy to embed and compile, with a very nice philosophy of "everything is a string". I've used it to create a tiny programming IDE on Pokitto -- it runs even on such small devices (32kb of RAM)! Really check that language out.



now my other favorites:

- C99: I've recently started using this exclusively for "normal" programs, because of the suckless/Unix philosophy, reliability, performance, efficiency, and mainly portability.
- Haskell: Most beautiful language I've seen, but I am practically not using it, because it's simply not as widely spread as C and so not supported anywhere.
- Python: Great for writing quick throwaway scripts to e.g. create visualisations etc. Nowadays I wouldn't use it for normal programs -- those that are supposed to last, such as games. That huge standard library is scary.
- browser JavaScript: Similar to Python, great if you need to create a quick GUI, a prototype or something, plus can be hosted online. I am however strongly against webpages using JS.
- I love many esoteric programming languages, but these are not seriously usable.

not so favorite:

- C++: bloated C, POO, includes accidental Turing complete sublanguages, very awkward backwards half compatibility with C resulting in ugly hybrids and confusions.
- Java: bloat as well, huge heavyweight runtime environment, forces you to create billions of files. I like at least it keeps to be strictly POO, unlike C++.

least favorite:

- C#: obviously, unnecessary, M$ BS, bloated, half-proprietary AFAIK.
- Objective-C: same.
- etc.

would like to check out:

- LISP: Have heard it's awesome.
- Rust: Everyone says it's pretty good and beautiful, looks like the new C, but still C is THE most portable and universal language, which makes me stick with it.
- Go: Is supposed to be the successor to C, so would like to check that out.

My favorites are:
#1 Python (for its simplicity, extensibility and ease of development), #2 C (for its speed and brute strength)

My least favorites are:
#1 Lua (I've never gotten around to even reading up on it, it's just trash), #2 Ruby/Ruby on Rails (because it imitates Smalltalk, Core and Standard API docs are incomplete, misleading, or wrong), #3 Dart (who uses it?)

drummyfish {l Wrote}:- Go: Is supposed to be the successor to C, so would like to check that out.

By all means check it out as it is definitely be a language good to know, but I don't get where you got the notion from that it will replace C?
I don't think that was the original intend nor the current direction of Go at all.

At most you could maybe say that is is intended to replace enterprise level Java.

But in reality Go is something else all together to my understanding:
1. it takes a lot of good things from Erlang in regards to concurrency etc. and is thus a really efficient language for so called "cloud" applications
2. It compiles into a single binary with no or very few external dependencies with makes it very easy to deploy on cloud servers (kind of like a mini container build in)
3. It is intentionally simple and strict (even comes with a code formatting sanitizer)... which makes it a good language for long term open-source projects with often changing maintainers.

See also: https://yourbasic.org/golang/advantages ... va-python/

I considered LIL for a rewrite of my first FPS engine a couple years ago, but I dropped it in favor of CSV and JSON. LIL raises too many compiler warning and isn't open to patches, so I have to ignore it for the sake of long-term stability. I know the guy is using it in his own Unity-like engine, but my use cases were more demanding.

C99 and JavaScript are awesome languages, though it would be nice if JavaScript had reference counting rather than a GC, like Lobster. Every bit of performance counts for my use cases.

I agree on C++ and Java, though I like C++ just a little more. I always try to keep C code C++-compatible and C++ code C-like. Each language has its own use cases.

Objective-C is not just a bloated Apple thing. It works everywhere C++ works. Its problem is that it sucks as a language. C# is a better language, but it brings the bloat of the CLR. Too bad C++ doesn't have a serious competitor in the high-level domain.

Would like to try Erlang since Julius is so fond of it and I know nothing about it.

Go ain't the successor to C. Successor to JavaScript maybe.

Ntech {l Wrote}:My least favorites are:
#1 Lua (I've never gotten around to even reading up on it, it's just trash), #2 Ruby/Ruby on Rails (because it imitates Smalltalk, Core and Standard API docs are incomplete, misleading, or wrong)

Fun fact: these are apparently the only two widely deployed languages that were not developed in the US or western Europe. Lua is from Brazil and Ruby from Japan. Which is maybe why the English documentation leaves things a bit less than perfect.

From my pure user perspective Lua seems fine (a lot of game mods were written in it as the script language) but Ruby software usually is a total memory hog and thus not very kind on server side software.

fluffrabbit {l Wrote}:Would like to try Erlang since Julius is so fond of it and I know nothing about it.

Na, probably not worth it as most of the software houses that work with it are transitioning to Go these days ( I was told, mainly because it is easier to find people that know Go).

I also don't have actual experience writing code with it myself, but I was told it is a pretty obscure language developed for high performance telecommunication stuff back in the early internet days. So it is efficient but probably not quite up to modern standards.

I mostly like it because there is some really cool open-source software written in it. For example ejabberd a nice XMPP server, or Wings3D and awesome 3D modelling app. Maybe more modern and worth a look it also the Mastodon compatible Pleroma.

Right, so, as a hypothetical employer, I hire people based on them knowing an arbitrary language I pull out of a hat. Today, I feel like hiring only LIL developers. Our whole infrastructure will be LIL this month. Next month it will be Brainfuck.

Naa, they try to hire Erlang developers because their legacy code base is in Erlang... but these developers are rare and not many people are interested in learning such a niche language. So they look for alternatives that are more popular with developers but can still fulfill the needs in regards to performance and functionality? I fail to see how that is bad?

Go is just as arbitrary as Erlang. If you have seriously tried to use it, as I have, you will run into a number of shortcomings that aren't a problem with C, C++, and Python. Google uses Go internally as they're trying to push their own language, but unless you're working at Google, you might as well explore D, Rust, Java, Ruby, and all the other enterprise languages and do what you want. If Go floats your boat, you're probably an extremely pedantic, possibly masochistic programmer.

fluffrabbit {l Wrote}:If Go floats your boat, you're probably an extremely pedantic, possibly masochistic programmer.

Tuche

But I have seen too many open-source projects fail as the sole maintainer lost interest and the code-base was so obscure to others that no one felt like continuing with the project. Go seems to enforce a certain code hygiene (call it pedantic if you like) that tries to limit this code sustainability issue

Darwin's law of shitty projects dying holds true no matter what language you use. If you're a bad enough dude to write a game in Go, you're a bad enough dude to make C++ code almost as clean and readable. If you're using C, bonus points.

Also bear in mind that if you're on C/C++ and compiling in release mode, you won't have to wait for GC in your FPS loop, but Go can make the stutter.

Julius {l Wrote}:

fluffrabbit {l Wrote}:If Go floats your boat, you're probably an extremely pedantic, possibly masochistic programmer.

Tuche

But I have seen too many open-source projects fail as the sole maintainer lost interest and the code-base was so obscure to others that no one felt like continuing with the project. Go seems to enforce a certain code hygiene (call it pedantic if you like) that tries to limit this code sustainability issue

Masochism is one of the nine stupidities in Wograld, but none of the game is written in that language. Somehow I don't think "code hygiene" is the real reason projects get abandoned and never continued. I suspect its more of a combination because either it never compiled and ran (or people couldn't get it to compile and run.) and hardly any one ever heard of it or even played.

I don't know anything about Go, but I find this idea of enforcing "code hygiene" to actually be counter productive to newbies learning a language. You have to learn to do things wrong before you can do them right. (I remember pascal, and how it was supposed to be a learning language, and how useless it turned out to be in the real world.)

Yet paradoxically, people love to shit on JavaScript, which must be the most newbie-friendly language in the world after BASIC.

Jastiv {l Wrote}:I find this idea of enforcing "code hygiene" to actually be counter productive to newbies learning a language. You have to learn to do things wrong before you can do them right.

+1

Also Python has so many ways to do things, but there can be only one, the "Pythonic" way. Since it gains new abilities, old Pythonic ways need to be sacrificed, meaning that if you are a true Pythonista, you break things for the sake of style alone. Hooray. (Not entirely a fair statement, though it sums up my own feelings on the matter.) Particularly relevant due to Python taking the place of nearly every older educational language (Logo puts up a very good fight-- propped up and sponsored by those who design dueling robots.)

I don't think Go was ever meant as a first time programmer learning language... once you have a basic notion of what can go wrong in other languages maybe it is time to look into Go
P.s. "right" is highly subjective... the "code hygiene" in Go isn't about being "right" but about bringing consistency between multiple programmers working on the same code base (and being easier to understand even with complex code bases).