What is your current favorite programming language, and why?

I've glanced at Ruby before, probably after someone remarked on how clean it is. I just took another look this afternoon, and was once again found myself ready to abandon the attempt without doing anything useful, for the usual reasons:

* Lack of documentation: If I write a method that takes a block, how do I then pass that block on to another method? The introductory guides give examples, but no general rules for how blocks work. After a bit of searching, I found the Pragmatic Programmers' guide which, although good, appears to be at least a year out of date. And I still haven't found the answer, though I'm not done searching. Then again, maybe I'm just slow or something.
* Hackishness: The syntax is usually clean, friendly, DWIM, and the like. But when you look at some of the corner cases, it gets frightening. Take a look at this from the doc:

When Ruby sees a name such as ``a'' in an expression, it needs to determine if it is a local variable reference or a call to a method with no parameters. To decide which is the case, Ruby uses a heuristic. As Ruby reads a source file, it keeps track of symbols that have been assigned to. It assumes that these symbols are variables. When it subsequently comes across a symbol that might be either a variable or a method call, it checks to see if it has seen a prior assignment to that symbol. If so, it treats the symbol as a variable; otherwise it treats it as a method call.

So if I add a local variable "foo", it can silently mask subsequent calls to a function "foo" that I've been happily calling for a month? Yikes. Sure, Perl has some wierd things going on in places, but they mostly just show up in golf games.

Don't get me wrong -- it's a fun, interesting language; if you squint a bit, it's clean at a higher level. But it still seems like a hack, not a solid foundation for software. I wouldn't trust it with my file system.
----------------------------------------

JavaScript is probably one of the best languages. It is included with every computer like sort of like basic was back in the old days. So it should make for a great beginner language. It does need some IO functions though besides calling web pages. Currently I use PHP to deal with i/o stuff: file handling, database queries.

However, my favorite language is still Assembly. Having that amount of control over the computer is what I want. Unfortunately, it is a dieing language. I haven't done any assembly language programming in a long time. About 5 years ago I got into web development so I spend most of my time with PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and SQL.

This is such a hard question.
The first language I really learned was php. I actually now hate it, I still use it though because I can get projects done quick in it (hate it but it works well for what it does). Academically I have been taught Java, and some C++. C++ I actually really like but I find myself wasting time chasing errors I don't understand, so I actually tend not to use it. Java is the most well designed language I have used (IMHO). I find code written in it easy to understand and usually pretty well structured. Java I would consider my favorite if it was actually good at what I like to do .
Currently I have a love hate relationship with Actionscript 3. I really hated learning it, because It has inconsistent hard to understand behavior... its a quirky language (and not well documented on those specifics). Its great for doing 2d drawing and animation on the web though, and if you have the patience to trial and error your way to understanding the quirks... its actually amazingly flexible...
I want an excuse to write python... I got a glimpse of it while scripting in maya and it was pretty damn cool.

Honestly my favorite language seems to be the latest one I've mastered (in my opinion). They all seem to have their uses.

C++0x is supposed to much better, more relevant STL errors, although whether we ever get to see 0x in our lifetime is questionable.

Debugging C++ is a skill that you can only build through doing it over and over. Once you're fairly proficient with the language, the "weird" errors become less frequent.


If you like Java, you should play around with C# (if doing Windows .NET programming, obviously). I tend to like some of the .NET counterparts to Java's libraries in many cases.


I used AS3 a few years ago on my first co-op, and I rather liked it. Granted, I was using it to write Flex applications, so my experience was likely quite a bit different from yours. Overall, AS3 has, IMO, a very Java-like feel to it, but with a few niceties such as functions-as-objects and property getter/setters.

I gave up on Actionscript a couple of years ago now. It was nice when it was a simple language, but then they just started to complicate everything.

I figure I might as well be writing a desktop application with a less paranoid set of security restrictions if I'm going to get that in depth with the language.