This isn’t even remotely supposed to be based on facts, evidence, benchmarks or anything like that. You could even disagree with what are “scripting languages” or not. All of the below just reflect my personal preferences. In any case, here’s my list of favourite computer languages, divided into two categories: scripting and, err… I guess “not scripting”.
My favourite scripting languages, in order:
- Python
- Ruby
- Emacs Lisp
- Lua
- Powershell
- Perl
- bash/zsh
- m4
- Microsoft batch files
- Tcl
I haven’t written enough Ruby yet to really know. I suspect I’d like it more than Python but at the moment I just don’t have enough experience with it to know its warts. Even I’m surprised there’s something below Perl here but Tcl really is that bad. If you’re wondering where PHP is, well I don’t know because I’ve never written any but from what I’ve seen and heard I’d expect it to be (in my opinion of course) better than Tcl and worse than Perl. I’m surprised how high Perl is given my extreme dislike for it. When I started thinking about it I realised there’s far far worse.
My favourite non-scripting languages, in order:
- D
- C++
- Haskell
- Common Lisp
- Rust
- Java
- Go
- Objective C
- C
- Pascal
- Fortran
- Basic / Visual Basic
I’ve never used Scheme, if that explains where Common Lisp is. I’m still learning Haskell so not too sure there. As for Rust, I’ve never written a line of code in it and yet I think I can confidently place it in the list, especially with respect to Go. It might place higher than C++ but I don’t know yet.
Átila on Code 