craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

My attitude on various computer languages has gone through a lot of evolutions over the decades (I remember as a grade schooler I thought the FOR...NEXT loop was way too complicated), and I wish I'd written out what I thought at the time since it would be interesting (and probably pretty embarrassing) to re-read later ("Perl is AWESOME! Anybody who writes anything using anything else is stupid and wasting their time"—imaginary me, circa 1998). So I've decided to start now and sort of document what the computer languages I actually use (or play with) are these days, and what I think of them. This may only be useful to me since I'm the only guy with a clear idea of how I used to think, but it's my blog and I write what I want.

• Java—What I use for 100% of my time at work (I'm not counting stuff like SQL, Javascript, XML, or "AJAX" as programming languages in the context of this discussion) and probably 80% at home. Which means that unlike a lot of people this is a language I actually enjoy using. Like everybody else, this is not a language I liked at first. But as I have learned more and more about programming as "software engineering" I have got a lot more respect for Java.

  Another huge evolution has been my new conviction that programming languages are not in and of themselves relevant—except that sometimes knowing a better language can be a shortcut that lets you get somewhere faster than everybody else. Platforms are what matter. Not libraries, platforms, as in the 'official' language of a given computing platform used and supported by whoever puts out that platform. The languages that become important and widespread are the native languages for a platform, period. C is important because of UNIX, C++ because of Microsoft, Objective C for Apple. And Java for the Java platform, the only one that's portable. C# is rapidly becoming important because .NET is becoming Microsoft's platform; it will increase at C++'s expense, as, I think, we are already seeing. If Java's libraries were not so vast and complete as to qualify for 'platform' status Java would be a second-rate Ada for me. (In that Ada is the ultimate "software engineering" language, but it has poor libraries availible to the casual coder—and besides, it is not the "native language" of any platform.)

• Lisp—My old favourite has been relegated to second place following my realisation regarding platforms trumping languages. Still for the most difficult problems I will turn to Lisp, and I still back the maxim that those who do not know Common Lisp are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. But IDE's like Eclipse make development in Java almost as pleasant. Anyway, Lisp is my language of choice for modelling complexity, but for simple tasks it doesn't have the libraries (and for some reason I find it a lot harder to get used to a third-party library in Lisp than in other languages).

• Perl—Perl hasn't been one of my favourite languages since high school, and I stopped favouring scripting languages over languages that enforce good software engineering practices the first time I had to rewrite a 10,000 line program of mine that didn't scale (in fairness, that program was written in Scheme, not Perl). But I have recently started using Perl a lot more, since a "right tool for the right job" approach practically dictates that it be used for text processing and glue code. Nowadays though I don't write any larger programs with it, but I am very glad I got back into it.

• C—I've been brushing up my C a lot this year, partly out of guilt at not contributing to Open Source (another topic in itself) and partly because it's the most important programming language in history. I got K&R for Christmas (I had read it a couple times but never bought it because of the price) and have gone through that, and done a few of the excercises, and also did some stuff with Glib and ncurses, and did a Linux kernel device driver tutorial.

  I have only used it for toys though, since I have yet to come up with a project for which it meets the "best tool for the job" criterion in 2006. But I am hugely glad that I decided to brush up on it, because a thorough understanding of pointers is actually a great help in writing Java code (which, although it doesn't have pointers, does pass objects around by reference; and understanding this clearly is paramount for judging the cost of some things, and eliminating redundant lines of code in others). So I think that getting my C knowledge straight has contributed enormously to making me a better and more knowledgeable programmer, even if I don't actually use C.

• C++—This was the first PC language I learned, which led to me not touching it again for 8 years. I don't like C++, I still see it as error-prone and unportable, with its defining feature being that every language feature known to man has been crammed into it at some point. Nonetheless, I thought that as a professional programmer it is something I should be competant in, so I have set about relearning it from scratch. The language has changed so much from my Visual C++ 1.0 days that it's almost unrecognisable... I really would like to learn this well enough to have it on my resume and maybe use one day at work (it feels precarious having only Java as a sellable "work language" on my resume), but I do not see myself coding in C++ at home by choice any time soon.

• Stuff I don't use anymore—Scheme, which was once my weapon of choice, now isn't even installed on most of my computers. I'd probably use it (and Dr. Scheme) if I were teaching programming to beginners though since its regularity is very nice. Tcl/Tk used to be very good for portable GUIs, but there are other ways to do this now, and Java is more portable. Prolog was a real eye-opener to learn, but I haven't used it in a long time and my textbook is locked up in storage in Canada, so it's pretty irretreaveably forgotten for the time being. C64 BASIC was once synonomous with programming for me, but I have not used BASIC since high school. Logo however has the sole claim to glory of being the only language that I haven't used since elementary school.

• Stuff I'd like to use more— Ada, Fortran 95, Assembly. Mostly for learning purposes, although the first two, Ada especially, might be useful for something non-trivial if the problem played to the language's strengths. I haven't done much with Python or Ruby either, although despite this they would probably be my recommendations if a non-programmer asked me what programming language to learn since they are so user-friendly and have great libraries.

So there's a good snapshot of my views on various programming languages circa 2006; it will be interesting to put it in the time capsule and see how it stands up to future scrutiny.