Which programming language has the prettiest syntax?

Which programming languages do you never get tired of reading? Which designers nailed the readability factor?

Comments

[Valentin Baca]

Python, Ruby, Go, and well-written C and SQL.

I like terse syntax, lots of syntactic sugar, and languages that just say what they're doing

I love love love that go has One Format Style. Done. I care about code style so much that I just don't want to deal with it anymore, if that makes any sense?

[Ben Halpern]

I most appreciate Ruby when I have to spend large amounts of time reading basically any other language.

I like the Erlang thing where . ends the routine as if it were ending a sentence. Of course, dot-notation being so pervasive makes it kind of impractical. But if I were making a language from scratch I might consider that as a way to be more language-like.

Example:

f({connect,_,To,_,_} = Signal, To) ->
    ...;
f(Signal, To) ->
    ignore.

[Donald Merand]

Elixir! It has a lot of the syntactical sugar from Ruby, which is very nice, but mainly I just love reading functions that look like:

def the_main_workflow(data, other_data) do
  data
  |> first_transformation
  |> now_spice_it_up_with(other_data)
  |> one_last_transformation
end

[eronaeon]

Javascript ES6+/Typescript

[Ben Halpern]

I haven't found Typescript very pleasant to look at—though I haven't given it a lot of time.

[Isaac Lyman]

TypeScript struck me as pretty ugly at first, like a pile of metadata stapled onto JavaScript. But I've come around to it. And it offers a couple of features that really do make ES more readable and expressive, like enums and interfaces.

More generally, I think any language that you can express yourself in and have experience with will become "pretty" to you, as long as it doesn't actively frustrate you.

[gengns]

You can use the standard, JSDocs and type inference with your IDE to archive the same goal without compiling and adding extra code.

[Kasey Speakman]

Piet

This is a Piet program that prints "Piet".

[Umair Ali ✳️]

Given below is for loop syntax to ‘print 1 to 10 numbers’ in 4 different Programming languages:

1

JAVA for(int i=1;i<11;i++){ System.out.println(i);
}

2

Python for x in range(1,11):
print(x)

3

Kotlin for (i in 1..10) {
println(i)
}

4

Swift for i in 1...10 {
print(i)
}

You are required to calculate points of each language on the basis of the following aspects:

1. Readability
2. Reliability
3. Cost/Programming effort You have total of 30 points for each language.10 points for each aspect based on your opinion. Scale: 1 point lowest and 10 highest

[Meghan (she/her)]

functional programming languages are very pretty. more recently I've been using Go a lot, which is very nice also

[Sergey Kislyakov]

I find myself liking every language that's being used properly and well-written (formatting, etc.). Though my favorite is Ruby because of its syntax sugar things.

[Dimer1275]

C#