Programming languages

[craigcmehil]

I just had an email pop into my inbox about why PHP was so hated! I know it was clickbait but it got me thinking and years ago here in the Community we had a lot of back and forth around PHP. In fact my very first blog post on the Community was about the topic.

My background was after all web development and back then and I think even today PHP was a big deal, I saw some surveys saying PHP was still in the top 10 languages, etc.

So being a curious one that I am and knowing that many who code will also code for fun as well. What's your favourite language?

For work, for personal and for crazy ideas?

I don't really get to code for work anymore but the last coding I did was NodeJS based, for personal most of the recent stuff has been Python and for the really crazy ideas I've found I tend to jump straight into Node again...

Python has been on several Astrology related things and the crazy stuff was of course trying to build AI style interfaces which was really a combination of Node and Python.

Oh this questions now reminds me of another relic of days of old here in the community, the bag conversations.

[yogananda]

@craigcmehil ..  Few days back Survey was published by Stackoverflow for popular programming lang
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies

Future programming language would be either Go or Rust to stay on top

[craigcmehil]

You say "Go or Rust" to stay on top but after all these many years the survey continues to highlight the basic same ones at the top. If I look at this one from Redmonk it also does not really seem shocking with what's there.

Is there really a chance for something to knock the giants out of the top and be the next best thing? Or are the surveys being done in the wrong places these days?

[thomas_jung]

I'd add my vote for Rust as well. I started learning it last year in my spare time.  It's very C-like in both its use cases and syntax/architecture.  Obviously good if you are interested in system level access and compiled executables. The other cool thing about Rust was how much it reminded me of old school ABAP.  The importance of scoping and passing by value and by reference.  We used to worry about that a lot more in ABAP years ago (and it's still what happens behind the scenes but most people don't worry about the call stack much any longer). It brought back good memories. 

[TammyPowlas]

I will say ABAP because it is the most useful to me to date.

I will go back in time and in college I learned Fortran and Pascal.

Then when I joined the workforce I took C programming in a class at a shopping mall (!) with several engineers from Sprint (I did not work at Sprint)

Then in my masters course we learned C++.  

I did play around with R and Python but I don't have any real time to spend with it.  

[craigcmehil]

I have found memories (or cursed ones) of Fortran in college...  I used to keep track (badge of honour) for each language I had learned, written something in that was useful and written in that is still used today. The list of course got smaller there.

So a shopping mall? 

[TammyPowlas]

A local community college held classes in a shopping mall in the 1990's and it was convenient for me (also cheap).  Since then the Kansas City mall has been destroyed 😞  

[former_member10945]

So depending on the target:

Golang - quick and portable, something that I may come back to. Easy to build a reasonable foundation. Interoperability still not wide. 

nodejs - churn out some garbage I never want to look at again but interops with whatever random junk I may need. 

[SergioG_TX]

Favorites?

1) JavaScript in all its forms/frameworks such as NodeJS, plain vanilla, Angular, UI5.

2) C#

I tried learning Python but it wasn't really sticking to me as good as JS. Maybe not for the reason I wanted to use it for... I tried Go a few years back and it reminded me so much of JS so I didn't follow up w it. I think it would be a good language to learn

[garendse]

Former ABAP coder here - due to Covid layoffs and lack of demand of ECC6 skills in the job market.

I am now coding in Python for ETL work - it is just wonderful to plug into an open ecosystem and have access to quality tools (Pycharm/VS Code) and you don't need to spin up a huge hunk of a VM just to be productive (btw the SAP 1909 docker image is still missing in action after months).

[qmacro]

I'd like to highlight a little language that I've been obsessing over recently, and that's jq. It's a Turing-complete language that's functional in nature, and is designed to operate on JSON structures. It can also read non-JSON data, as well as output JSON or other formats. It's fascinating in its own right, but also - in today's cloud world where there are many declarative approaches using JSON, and where the majority of APIs output JSON - super useful too. 

jq's homepage is at https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ and I've also been writing various blog posts on jq - you can find them over here via the 'jq' tag: https://qmacro.org/tags/jq/ 

Has anyone else dabbled in this lovely language? 

[johna69]

If it's command line, I write it in C or bash.

Most my current projects are running on microcontrollers, so for that I use C++.

Anything I am running in CF, I typically use Node now, this has replaced Java for me.

For mobile, I am now moving to Swift, I have a lot of code written in ObjectiveC that is being slowly migrated.

Looks like Rust could be interesting for me if it's C like.... pointers FTW!

[grahamn]

Python for the flexibility (infuriating though it can be)

Q# for the weirdness of a language that thinks in qubits

ABAP for the win

[yogananda]

Bun is making promise to speed the application runtime much faster 3x ...  Node vs Deno  loosing its pace.


@sapcommunity_bo 

[thomas_jung]

Have you seen the tweets from Jakob Kjaer:
(1) Jakob Marius Kjaer (@uxKjaer) / Twitter

He's been posting about his experiments with Bun and UI5. 

[yogananda]

Thanks @thomas_jung .. didn't know its already started in SAP... good to know.

[NTeunckens]

Favourites : ABAP, TypeScript, Python, ...