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If You Switched Languages, Which Would You Choose?

dev.to staff on August 29, 2023

If you were to dive into a programming language you've never used before, which one would you choose? Share your pick and the reasons behind it. Di...
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Mitchell Mutandah • Edited

I'd go for Go.

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Ben Halpern

Maybe Zig?

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Griff Polk

Puns! No! NO PUNS NOOOOOOOOOOOO :)

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Harry Wood

This reminds me of the "admired & desired" results in the stackoverflow developer survey, although I'm not quite sure how to interpret that. A lot of people desire to work with "zig"? really? I've only just heard of it.

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eshimischi

Rust

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Griff Polk

I’ve wanted to try Ruby/Ruby On Rails for a while, is that wrong?

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Jan Peterka

I recently went basically all in Ruby on Rails (for my web app projects), and so far, I love it. I think that it's great time to start with Rails, as there are many great improvements happening, making Rails really powerfull way to create web apps!

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Griff Polk

Nice, that makes sense. I am definitely going to start using it!

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Eljay-Adobe

My favorite languages are: D, Python, F#, and Lua.

For my day job, I currently program primarily in: C++ (C++17).

As long as we're dreaming, if I were king and switched from C++ to some other language for my day job, it'd likely be one of: Rust, Zig, Odin, Hylo (formerly Val), or Swift.

I'd also take a close look for consideration at Nim, Carbon, Jai (cough if Jon Blow ever finishes perfecting it cough), and Vale.

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Oscar

Probably C/C++! I've dabbled with C, and I really enjoy it. The only reason that I don't use it all the time is that it's just not applicable to what I'm looking to do for a career. Although, I might start poking around with C++ for CP.

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Mike Stemle

I already work in a variety of languages. I got in the habit years ago when I was in a job where I had to use ColdFusion, a language I didn’t care for.

We all have a number of tasks we do, and some of those can be automated, or at least we can build tools for ourselves. What a wonderful opportunity to learn a new language!

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J.R. Hill

I'm a fan of not having "a language." IMO this is for beginners who are learning to program, or for people who program casually.

Learn a ton of things -- languages, ecosystems, toolchains, etc but more importantly the underlying systems like the OS, browser, or device APIs -- and use the best tool for the job that you think you can figure out how to use.

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Andreas Sander

For webdev topics I would try Go as a backend server as I heard now several times that it is really comfortable for building simple backends fast and easy to understand.

To appreciate compilers, I would like to invest time into Rust as the compiler seems to be really, really good with precise error messages. But I assume the learning curve is way steeper and the time invest is probably huge to get a grasp on the Rust ecosystem and syntax.

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George Johnson

Highly recommended, been doing a lot of work lately with Gin in Golang using standard Bootstrap with HTMX in the pages ( I'm backender I'm afraid! ), the Gin framwork makes it super fast to stand up a server and get the data flowing out into the pages is childsplay as it does all the heavy lifting with minimal effort.

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Jordan-Tyler Burchett

Assembly and C.. I'd like to write my own OS kernel from scratch one day so these are essential but it will be very hard I know

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Bruno Santos

I'll be focusing on Golang soon (I'm a Nodejs guy now)

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Eljay-Adobe

I'd like to choose D or F#.

I'd probably actually choose Rust or Zig or Nim or Odin or Hylo (formerly known as Val) or Swift.

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Matthew Daly

I have thought that F# might be quite interesting.

I like functional programming so that aspect appeals to me. Bit put off by the whole .NET thing, though.

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Emanuele Bartolesi

Python.

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EllaBaker

I am interested in giving Python a try. Despite having used Java for nearly two years, I've heard that Python is considerably easier in comparison, although I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself.skysmotor.co.uk

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Gyau Boahen Elvis

I’d love to try Java

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George Johnson

Wrote in Java for about 3 years back around 2014 and coming from C++ and Perl it was certainly an eye-opener! A nice language where a lot of things are taken care of but I feel like it's getting a little long in the tooth now, I moved on to C# after Java and felt like C# was more what Java should have been if the politics hadn't strangled it. I now do Golang and loving it.

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Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez

I've been a big Python user for 12+ years, my next language would probably be Rust (to write high performance extensions and tools) or JavaScript (to learn modern web development)

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Akash Dev

I would love to try python. Currently I've been using java for almost 2 years and I've heard that python is much easier compared to it but I never actually tried it. 😅