Fridays are usually reserved for my entertainment/fun stuff posts and I was initially supposed to post a review of something or other, but I got lazy. So instead I decided to to a poll. It is also a nice choice for Fridays because it will stay on top of the blog for 3 days allowing it to gather more responses until it is pushed down and off the front page.
This is a tech related blog (well, more or less – I tend to branch out more and more) and I have tons of very technical posts here aimed at software developers, and talking about particular programming languages. I know that not all my regular readers are programmers though. I also know that I have some regular readers who never, ever But it would be nice to see what kind of languages are people who visit here using on a day to day basis. I think we did something similar before but not in a form of a poll. This time around I want to know what language you actually use on a daily basis. The stuff you use for work. We all have favorite languages, but these are not always the ones we use at work. So tell me about the language you need to use for better or for worse right now.
Please be nice with the write-in option. If I see too much of Chuck Norris I’m going to disable it. Use it wisely!
Done? Ok, now tell me about your favorite language. The one that you wish you were using at work. Your go-to language for all side projects. Or perhaps the language you wish you had time to learn better. I want to see if the two polls sync up significantly or if there is a wide disparity between them:
Unfortunately my sample size is pretty small as most polls get under a 100 votes so we might not see any interesting patterns emerging out of this exercise. But there is always a chance that by some random fluke Digg or Redit will bubble this up to the front page and we get more votes before the server catches on fire and melts down. So digg me up if you can!
Oh, and if you are not a programmer and you don’t plan to be, hit the polls too so that I can see comparatively how many people come here for the off-color humor and randomness that I seem to deliver in between my programming related posts. :)
I come here for entertainment critique and DRM rants
I enjoy being a C programmer, but I love Ruby and would like to have a chance to venture into Rubyland professionally (I could say the same thing about JavaScript too)
I didn’t see this until I visited the site.
Apparently not showing up in RSS feeds. :/ (Or I forgot about seeing it.)
Yeh, “Me No Programmer. Goo Goo Gah Gah”
@Ajzimm3rman: It shows up in Google Reader. And yes, I do subscribe to my own blog, for this very purpose – checking if it the entries show up when they need to. I haven’t checked before now, so there is a chance the RSS readers did not pick it up when it went live.
I queue all my posts these days (I like to be at least 4-5 days ahead) and I’m not sure if WordPress pings the aggregators this way, which means there might be a delay before they pick it up.
[quote comment=”10835″]@Ajzimm3rman: It shows up in Google Reader. And yes, I do subscribe to my own blog, for this very purpose – checking if it the entries show up when they need to. I haven’t checked before now, so there is a chance the RSS readers did not pick it up when it went live.
I queue all my posts these days (I like to be at least 4-5 days ahead) and I’m not sure if WordPress pings the aggregators this way, which means there might be a delay before they pick it up.[/quote]
I’m a big proponent of Google. I use Thunderbird for my RSS feeds though.
It’s the layout of Google Reader and how it works that bothers me.
(mostly because I have so many RSS feeds, and a lot of crap I like to filter through quickly. (select, shift, delete.))
And I tried to get used to it. :| But it’s just to irksome and not applicable for my uses.
I suppose it’s not a big deal though Luke, as I assume you won’t be polling every day. (I can check when I view commentaries when email-notified.)
Thanks for the response.
I, on the contrary, moved from Thunderbird’s RSS viewer to Google Reader. Thunderbird is quite bad to use from keyboard only and as I sometimes have to use other computers an online aggregator is much better.
Not a programmer, but interested in the tech stuff (excepting the technical details of how to do function x in language y which come up sometimes)
Well… we do some “programming” at college for the Computing course, but when it’s only VB or VBA in Access, I don’t think I can really count myself as being a programmer… I’d rather learn a proper language before I call myself that.
Don’t know what language I would choose to use though – Java sounds like quite the workhorse in terms of being used for lots of things, but Python sounds more friendly in terms of not being too verbose or boilerplate-ful. C and variants thereof go to the other end of the friendliness spectrum but are probably also good to know…
Won’t be long before I’m on a CompSci course at uni, so I’ll likely start off by learning whatever they want to teach, try and learn good programming practice from that since it’d be the first time I’ve actually been taught how to code, then from there try and learn other languages.
For now though, keep a steady flow of interesting randomness and off-colour humour flowing and I’ll be fine ;)
I’ve been doing java for two months now for my computer science course at the university of southampton. I’m aware of your opinion about it as a first language but I haven’t found it to be bad at all. That said, I have no real experience of other languages so my opinion means very little at this point in time.
@Sam Weston: Java is not a bad language. It is just verbose – but it is a fine place to start as long as you can deal with the boilerplate, and the fact that everything must be encapsulated in classes, and all it’s other quirks. But then again, all languages have funny quirks.
In fact, Java has grown leaps and bounds since I took it at school adding stuff such as generics, automatic boxing/un-boxing, a sane printf function and many other new features. So it’s not going to hamper your progress as a programmer. :)
Good to hear you say that. At the beginning all the syntax was a little confusing but I’m past that stage now and finding java to be quite logical. My lecturers very often mention things that you had to do manually a few years ago which java now does for you. That seems extremely convenient right now but I’m sure it’s going to cause me pain if I try and learn C or C++ in the future. Oh the joys I have to come!
If you think Java does many for you, Python makes the coffee and cleans the house ;P
But seriously, Java isn’t a bad language to start: C is too much for starters (most of my peers still didn’t grasp the whole “pointer” concept) and Python doesn’t give you good programming habits, as it’s very little strict.
Java also appears to be used in the real life, though I still struggle to understand why…
I just looked at the polls today… Holly Haskell Batman! I am totally surprised that, Haskell is tied with Java and PHP in the “currently programming in” poll.
I expected C, Java and PHP to be the top 3. Did not expect to see Haskell there. Interesting.
None of my readers seems to be using Ruby – I expected at least a few votes there.
Also, I noticed that some people did not fill out the second poll. I wonder why. First one has 88 votes, and the other one has only 65. Weird.
I’m a Java guy myself. I work on enterprise applications for work and most of my coding at home is done in Java. I do tend to tinker with other languages from time to time though.
I came up in the C (not C++) realm and I honestly think it’s the best place to start. I may be biased since I learned this way, but I feel like most of the essentials for programming can be learned in plain C. Then one can learn object-oriented programming through some other language (I actually started in C++).
I also feel it is essential to have some experience with functional programming. I’ve dabbled in LISP, Scheme, and ML and found the experience very rewarding.
23 difference, 12 of those could be the non-programmers who don’t know enough about the languages to make a choice (that includes myself)
I for one, was just skimming and nearly missed the second poll. That is probably the case with many of us.