Thread: Language - When To Use What?

Originally Posted by MDofRockyView

In this strict sense, all of the computer languages are absolutely useless in solving any problem what so ever and can be reduced to being practically all the same language, and even further reduced to a paradigm. It is their libraries (and more specifically the algorithms) that matter; as to how programmer judge them.

Considering said algorithms are implemented for the most part by the same programming language they are serving, I have an hard time accepting that conclusion.

If I was teaching I'd use C and Pascal as languages for students to learn, but if the kids are autistic then I'd teach Assembly and INTERCAL.

Originally Posted by pianorain

HERETIC!!! Personally, Lisp is my choice of language for just about anything. It's amazingly flexible and probably TOO powerful. CLOS provides all sorts of interesting possibilities for people used to thinking in OO terms, and FFI lets you use all those nifty dlls you've or someone else has written in other languages. Most implementations allow you to compile down to a portable bytecode or a native image. Besides, what other language lets you write a compiler for that language in about four lines of code?

I too am quite fond of lisp. It's a very powerful language, I only blame myself for not getting into it sooner (back when I was investigating it, there was no book on par with "Practical Common Lisp" which is, I think the best Lisp book there is for novices/people wanting to just learn lisp.) And of course if you're more of a minimalist you always have Scheme.

Originally Posted by valis

I waste too much time racking my brain over how many close perentheses I need. Haskell is just as powerful and I can produce a finished product much faster using it than I can lisp or scheme.

Well, more power to ya, but personally I find that Lisp allows me to do very rapid development, after you use it for a rather short period of time, parenthesis don't bother you as much and you can keep up with them pretty easily in your head I've found (of course I still count myself, but SLIME and Emacs (Lisp in a Box package) help out with that a lot.)

tjinr:
I think its good to go to wikipedia and read about these known languages.

Originally Posted by valis

I waste too much time racking my brain over how many close perentheses I need.

What, you don't have an editor that shows matching parentheses?

Originally Posted by valis

Haskell is just as powerful and I can produce a finished product much faster using it than I can lisp or scheme.

This is definitely true. IMO, Haskell's about as good as it gets. It's like, "Okay, I need a feature-complete parsing library." [5 mins later] "Whoops, I'm done. What next?"