Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The Right Language For The Job

The right language for the job is ... all of them. All of them at once. I want a garbage collected, bounds checked language that lets me drop down to C-level memory fiddling, runs at over 90% of the speed of plain-old-C and interprets code I type into a prompt. I want a language that checks types at compile time, except when I'm just tossing off some small quick thing. I want a functional programming language ... for about 20% of what I write, object orientation for 30% of my code, and miscellaneous glue of no particular dogma for the rest. I want a language that is terse but explicit and unambiguous. And finally I want a large standard library that helps me get done most of the common tasks I do these days, with a vast community supported set of libraries that cover even more (and most of those libraries have no dependency bloat and depend on nothing more than the standard library).
Did I forget anything?