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Ben Halpern
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What would the programming language sorting hat pick for you, and why?

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Matt Eland

Turbo Pascal. I'm old enough to remember using it and loving it, it's a 'teaching language' which fits my mentoring bent, and darn it if I still don't think in therms of := for object assignment from time to time.

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Paul Michaels

Turbo Pascal is definitely the best language (actually, the best language is Spectrum Basic - but I'm the first to admit it did have some tiny flaws)! To this day, I still haven't seen a better colour scheme in an IDE. If I'm not mistaken, the guys from Borland that designed it now work for MS on C#.

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saint4eva

He works with Microsoft. But as of 2019, he is in charge of Typescript - another great language like C#

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Matt Eland

Yep, I love my .NET and TypeScript. There are plenty of others I want to get into, but at the moment, this is where I focus.

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Don Morris

I used turbo pascal in the 80s, I loved it. I felt empowered by it.

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Matt Eland

And it did its job as a learning language. After coding in Turbo Pascal for awhile, I went on a family vacation, read a book on C++ cover to cover, and came back and could code in C++ without issues. Prior to Turbo Pascal as a stepping stone, that couldn't have happened.

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Don Morris

I went from turbo pascal to lightspeed/ think pascal to build Mac apps. I then used sams c and c++ primers to learn those and started building Mac apps in c and then c++.

I can remember in the late 80s VIP - visual interactive programming and how they were saying we wouldn’t be developing code using text editing in the future. Here I am in 2019 still editing software in text editors. Welcome to the future. 😀

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John McCabe

Well, Pascal was designed as a teaching language. Turbo Pascal was one of many non-standard extensions to standard (ISO/IEC?) Pascal which contributed to the decision to create Ada. Personally, I found Vax Pascal was better, but obviously not for MS-DOS!

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Dan Conn

Turbo Pascal was the first proper language that I learnt! I loved it!

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Matt Eland

I went QBasic to VB for Dos, and tried C++ next but it was too much for me as a teen so I learned Turbo Pascal and then C++, C#, Java, XAML, JavaScript, TypesScript, and F#.

I actually wound up teaching a lot of my class Turbo Pascal. We ended our semester building a game together using Borland Graphical Interface for Turbo Pascal.

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Dan Conn

I mucked around with BASIC as a small kid , then Turbo Pascal from 13, played with 8086 assembler a bit and then did HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Java, XML / XSLT, XQuery, and Python.

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Patrick D. Taylor • Edited

Pascal is a language.
Turbo Pascal is the name of the Pascal editor made by Borland.
Borland also made Turbo C++ editor.

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John McCabe

FWIW, Turbo Pascal included the environment, tools and numerous non-standard extensions to Pascal so, to some extent, was a language in its own right. Standard Pascal at the time was pretty much useless for serious programming since, as mentioned, Pascal was not designed for that. Turbo Pascal essentially morphed into Delhi.

There was also Turbo Prolog.

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Dan Conn

OK so when I signed up for pottermore.com I was chosen to be Ravenclaw! So what language best suits this.......

Python, being a snake surely is Team Slytherin so not that one.

Haskell favours purity - definitely Team Slytherin too.

If you've ever setup a Java enterprise project then this belongs to a house which values hard work, patience and loyalty - so Team Hufflepuff.

XML is clearly Slytherin too.

This is not going well......

So I guess with Ravenclaw's virtues of being intelligent, wise, sharp, witty, individual, then it has to be a language with a sense of humour, that is unique in it's style and needs a fair amount of effort to read. Yup, gotta be Brainfuck!

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Zaid Rehman

intelligent, wise, sharp, witty, individual ...

All this sounds like JavaScript

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Matt Eland

BF seems like hufflepuff to me.

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Dan Conn

Well, then you'd be wrong 😂😂🤤

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Simon Massey • Edited

Rust because it is a safe language without a garbage collector with advanced features like async/await yet it also compiles to webassembly so you can write isomorphic webapps in it chinedufn.github.io/percy/ or speed up bits of an electron app youtu.be/lLzFJenzBng It is also the most loved language on the annual stackoverflow survey with a great community youtu.be/FSrQX4uYuOM

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Chris James • Edited

So you would say when the sorting hat is put on your head that it says

  • Simon likes to pick up trash all the time and be very particular about it
  • Simon is very popular
  • Simon... is a web app?
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Simon Massey

Totally!

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Nested Software

You like to keep your code honest, straightforward, and explicit about what it's doing. You're not the biggest fan of mucking about with low-level details. Python is the language for you!

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Chris James • Edited

I think it's pretty wild how many of the comments seem to miss the point of the article and just talk about why their favourite programming language is the best.

For me:

I own a Slytherin scarf and give dirty looks to other houses when I walk around platform 9 and 3/4 on my way to work which implies a like of purity and the dark arts. So Scala for me.

Note: Not my favourite language!

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Nicholas Stimpson

Not answered, but then I've no idea what a sorting hat does.

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Bruce Axtens • Edited

Hmm ... prescriptive counseling. Too easy to blame the hat for bad outcomes. Think I'll give it a miss.

Besides, I'm never happy with my current language. I'm learning Crystal, Kotlin, Scala and Prolog (amongst others) on exercism.io. The hat would probably tell me to go back to doing User Support.

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engmms

Hi,we are from same Generation
I am start with GW Basic and Know try with Kotlin and Flutter

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Harsh Shandilya • Edited

Thanks for the link to Exercism! Didn't know about it and it looks like exactly what I was looking for :)

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saint4eva

C# because it is a general purpose language with both functional and OOP capabilities.

 
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Brian Ng

Perhaps the first impression is hard to change. The color is vibrant and traditional lol

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Riccardo Bernardini • Edited

Ada forever. I just love its robustness and how you can write software maintainable and that requires 10% of the usual debugging time (note: not 10% less). This, of course, if you help the compiler helping you.

It gives you a full array of tools for safe programming: from basic strong typing, to multi-task builtin (I saw a multitask software running on a Lego mindstorm with 16 bit CPU and a handful of RAM), from contracts to formal checking, up to tools for multi-core systems and distributed programming. I was told that the new version (due in 2020) will also have parallel loops and "pointer ownership" (to allow formal checking with software that uses pointers).

Oh, yes, and portability too... Few years ago we developed a library for P2P video streaming that was, more or less, 1Mbyte of source code. During the development we always worked on Linux. When it was ready, we copied the sources to a Windows machine, compiled them and... it just run, without the need of a "./config", nor a single conditional compilation.

If you know Pascal, Ada looks a lot like Pascal, but it is much more suitable for real application (as far as I know, Pascal was designed as a teaching language)

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Johan Alkstål

Dart because I like multiplatform development, good type support that's there when I need it, a sound ecosystem that just works and something that is powerful but feels like a breeze.

Seriously, Dart is a great programming language. Biggest downside is that it's mostly used by Google alone.