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Discussion on: Why did you chose Programing Language XYZ?

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

Many language choices were thrust upon me.

  • GW Basic, Pascal in high school
  • C, C++, Assembly in college
  • Javascript required for web
  • VB for side work

Others I chose based on information I found about them.

  • DOS Batch scripting, goofing around with a friend
  • Perl for linux scripting
  • PHP because it was easy to make web apps (early 2000s)
  • Java as a brief experiment (early 2000s)
  • C# because I grew tired of VB verbosity
  • Bash for linux scripting
  • Python for linux service dev (mid or late 2000s)
  • F# for the promise of better quality
  • Typescript to add extras to Javascript
  • Elm for the promise of better quality

Most transitions were not difficult, because many of these languages use a C-like syntax and familiar debug/compile cadences. And hardly anything is worse than where I started: DOS batch scripting. :)

All of them require learning a new set of "libraries". But some transitions were notably difficult.

  • Javascript, mainly because of all its weird edge cases -- especially around type coercion and browser support. The language was very brittle and limited in these early days.
  • Java, because of lots of unfamiliar tooling and non-obvious requirements (e.g. package name matching path). I recall using Forte for Java.
  • F#, because expression-based syntax was different from everything else I had used. Immutability is a confusing concept at first. And idiomatic FP code was very different from what I had done up to that point. It took at least 2 tries before I latched on to it.
  • Elm, mostly because all front-end tooling is a hot mess. But also getting used to the Model-View-Update pattern.