Arguing about programming languages feels to me at times like arguing about human languages. In many circumstances you need to choose one that is required and move beyond any idiosyncratic silliness that arises when it’s not “your favourite language.”

Honest, I love Lisp, you can do some pretty awesome stuff in it. But you also really don’t want to program Mediawiki in it or WordPress. At least, I don’t know of a good way to do that cleanly.

I don’t mind PHP and really don’t understand the PHP hatred I see all the time. PHP gives you a lot of leeway to build pretty good software which if you are wise is fairly maintainable. Facebook, WordPress, Mediawiki are all built on this solid framework.

I quite enjoy C and C++, but I never really see an opportunity to build a large project on it. It has so much power to do things rapidly when you do it right. Having developed encryption breaking code in it, code that sorted through hundreds of thousands of stock records rapidly, and even starting on a piece of software that worked as a foundation for producing certain types of websites rapidly. Yet, the time it takes to code correctly, combined with the rush-rush-rush nature of our society has made the cost per program for C code to be well above the going rate these days.

Ruby… Well, I have other issues with Ruby beyond the code, more the community. But I digress.

CL (RPG/400) honestly I used to love, tried to dive into again recently and realized I had forgotten almost all of it. Which will be a bit of a pain since I’m trying to redevelop a system to work within a Zend Framework (combined with immix) to integrate Medium to Large account systems in an effective manner with a web GUI. Hopefully that love will come back, but in the days of Google lookups for all of the other languages, CL still requires me digging through the massive tomes.

In the end though, the funnest part is seeing it all come together.

Nothing beats a Quantum Code Compiler for an NMR machine actually being used to spin atoms, or a decrypter breaking a system while it is still negotiating the keys, or even better, a mutual fund analysis tool giving pretty good predictions on ROI for the following year.

Just seeing production. That’s what matters.

if you want to go argue about programming languages go back to the elementary school yard and argue it there. The adults need to do real work.

KJR