drwex | What, me program?

Propagating another questions meme, this one from

ceo...

Comment with the words "Top Ten" or "Top Five", and I will reply with a subject for which you will generate a top ten (or top five) list. Post the list and instructions in your own journal.

ceo asked me for my top 5 programming languages, and why. This is tough because I'm not really a programmer (any more). I suspect he'd think I was cheating if I listed five dialects of LISP. Sigh.

1. Java. It's become a big bloat of a system these days and I lost track of how they try to do GUI things at least four complete revisions ago, but the language more or less saved my arse when I was doing my PhD. I had struggled to do my MS in C++ and nearly completely foundered on things like template classes and other hackery. Java was like an actual object-oriented language designed that way from the ground up. And it was more or less customized to do the kinds of things I needed it to do. When my system got bigger and we started having to do things like deliver a meg of data over the net at client startup I flailed around for all of three minutes before discovering that someone had (gods bless them) implemented a compressed stream class. All I had to do was change a few I/O routines to use that subclass and bango! a factor of 10 speedup. Really nice.

2. LISP. If I have to pick dialects it's a close race among elisp for simplicity and Common LISP for doing everything AND the kitchen sink. Common LISP is still the only inheritance system I've seen that successfully manages multiple parents and mix-ins. On the other hand, from what I read of objects and inheritance these days, deep inheritance is out; interfaces and virtual classes are in, with shallow and broad object hierarchies.

3. Pascal. Simply for historical reasons. My first "real" programming language and because I'm too embarrassed to list BASIC.

4. XML/CSS. This is sort of cheating because I don't think it's a real language in the Turing-complete, LR(1) sense. It's really just a macro system and a tree data structure on steroids. On the other hand, XML has shown remarkable power as a generator of languages, most of which are silly and ridiculous but you could say the same thing about LISP. That said, XSL makes my brain hurt.

5. Ruby on Rails. Not that I've ever written a line of it or would even vaguely claim to know it, but it makes the list as "language I'd be most likely to try to learn if I was forced to learn a new programming language." If I'm required to list languages in which I've actually written something, I'd put SQL here but I never really learned the language well enough to understand its power. Mostly I just loathed its obtuse ugliness.