Perferred Programming Languages, What's your favorite?

I like to program a wide variety of things although mainly games. I personally like C++, Python or Maybe VB.net/6, I like Python and C++ most because 1)they're both very well documented and known 2) They both have understandalbe Syntaxes 3) They're Cross Platform (most important to me) you see I myself am on a Windows XP computer, but a few of my friends are on Macs and macs are very limited in sharing support to the same things as windows, I feel really bad that I can run the things I make but they can't and so Cross-Platforming is very handy, Hello OpenGL!

What about you folks here?

Current Favorites: C and or Assembler

Used: Fortran, RPG and once Cobol


Avoid at all possible: Java, Virtual anything

Old programmer

Yeah, I'd forgotten about Assembley, that's a pretty good one too,

depends on what kind of programming I'm doing.

For scripting, give me TCL. for application programming, C89, C++ is good for GUIs

you know I'm suprised for our large community we have so few programmers, there's probably only a maximum of 10 and the ones I can think of Right now are

Me
Aaediwen
Mahdahd
tsargent62
Macfive (CelticRadio)
jbarron
subhuman
and pretentiouswombat

If I missed you I apologize!

not very many at all...

Do ex-programmers count?

I switched over to database administration about 10 years ago but did programming and systems analysis and design for a long time before that.

We used to program in Fortran, COBOL, Pascal and C.

What kinds of applications does everyone do?

of course they count. I mainly program games, and some web applications. I'm pretty sure Aaediwen does web apps and quite a bunch of other programs
Not really sure what kinda things Madadh does and pretentiouswombat does websites and stuff last I heard.

From a performance standpoint, I'd agree with you 100%. However for cross-platform coding, sorry but Java wins hands-down. C++ was mentioned previously because it's used by both Win and Mac environments, you're rarely going to use the same code on both.
It's also much more likely that a computer will have the JRE installed than it is that a computer will have a C compiler. Writing code that Visual C++ accepts will throw warnings under GCC, and vice-versa.

That having been said, it's a hobby for me and not a job. I participate in several OSS projects, but haven't done any serious coding for about a decade. Like jbarron, I tend to refer to writing in C and not C++, because that's what I started with. I think I still have my Borland C Compiler for DOS around somewhere....

These days, if I'm writing it tends to be in a scripting language. Since it's not a career for me, I don't need top-notch performance and I really don't have the time to (re)learn C and C++. TCL, REXX and a few things in NSIS. Ok, calling NSISa language may be a stretch, but it comes close.

jime307,

I am a senior computer scientist for the Department of Defense. I do a lot of system code and currently work with large parallel processing systems. I do a lot of cross compiling between systems and have found that C and assembly work best for me.
For the systems I use C is standard and always available. It also allows me to work closely with the actual system and not have to rely on someone else to tell me what works best. That said, I also like command line computers and punched cards .... Oh I guess I am showing my age again.

Command line rules!

And I do hope I'm readying some of you guys wrong thinking you're calling Assembly cross-platform. That's about like saying German and Gaelic are mutually intelligable. C, on the other hand, is available on every platform I've had reason to encounter and generally works from the same source tree. Sometimes it needs some stuff re-written, but not a complete re-write.

As for what I write, it depends on what strikes my fancy or need. I've done a FE for mpg321, I've coded a TCL interface between an IRC bot and this site's database, I've done some coding on the site itself, and put together some small bash scripts for handling multiple network interfaces.

Well, speaking of command line, guess it's about time to go back to my CLFS build.

Assembly is about as far from cross-platform as it gets
About C++, I really try to program cross-platform so I try to stay far away from Visual C++ as much as possible, I usually code my program using a Library to make my GUI, like Allegro, or openGL which are both majorly cross-platform. I like allegro because it has plugins for all the graphics things that each OS uses, for windows it can run off of DirectDraw, for Linux OpenGL and there's plugins for mac as well.