What are the best coding languages?

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I'm familiar with C++, and I've heard of a number of other languages out there. I'm interested in your personal opinions. Which programming language is most versatile, while not reaching Malbolge-like difficulty? (Malbolge shouldn't even count, but it was used as an exaggerated comparison. )

Remember, I'm interested in versatility, not ease of use.

As an old-school, hyper-systemising autistic person, I am still partial to the now-rarely-used APL language. If you can visualise and mentally manipulate multidimensional abstract structures and negotiate its sensible symbolic representation, you can quickly code the most complex of analyses. I wouldn't create a large commercial system with it any more, but for 25 years running it remains my tool of choice for OLAP.

If you are more of a linear thinker than a systemic patternist, you will probably find APL to be torturous.

from the unemployment meetings I used to go to, Java and C# are being sought as marketable.

The language I have the most fun coding on: C++
The language I made the most money from: Java.
The languages I like but probably wouldn't use for anything big: python, ruby
Not incredibly bad: Delphi

I use C++ whenever possible for my clients' embedded systems projects, especially since many platforms now use the Gnu compiler.

Despite their initial reticence ("Why can't you just use straight C?"), they learn quickly to appreciate the flexibility inherent in the object-oriented paradigm once they start making last-minute specification changes, only to learn that I anticipated such in my original design.

And I'll never give up my pointers!

What means Gnu? It means "Gnu's not unix."

Why not?

Like:
C
BASIC
Assembler
C++
CLIPS
LISP

Really sends me crazy:
Prologue

The big ones you should know are:
Visual Basic
C#
Java
C++

as for some other ones useful to know:
XML
Python
Ruby
Perl
CG
GLSL
HLSL

I mainly use Visual Basic nowadays. Over the last thirty years I've been programming I've used many different languages. I live VB (Visual Studio 2008) because I can turn around projects very quickly with it. The compiled code is also much faster to execute than it used to be back in the days of VB6.

Your choice of programming language should be appropriate for each development task and the target platform(s).

There is no best language, though there are some horrible ones out there.

Python is a good start.

C can be learned by a beginner, but somewhere at the intermediate stage you are going to have your mind boggled by the esoteric stuff. Beyond that point you will be looking for something that is faster to develop in. C++ perhaps.

mind benders include lisp/scheme, java can be easy to learn, tricky to remember stuff. The lisp family is good to learn as a 3rd or 4th language.. it will change how you think about programming.

Assembler is fast to learn the various statements.. but dont expect to be productive in it; it just takes too long. its like measuring miles, millimetres at a time. comment the hell out of your code or expect to not know what something does an hour later.

I'm hearing a lot of Java, C++, and Visual Basic. I've also heard Ruby and Python.

What about APL? How limited is its functionality? Is it particularly difficult to scale-up, or just a pain in the ass to learn?

I like ruby and python. Lua is good if you want a small embeddable language (embeddable within a program, but also possible to run on embedded systems).

I have done far too much php for my liking. However it is not quite as terrible as it once was to be fair.

now bad languages; Cobol 74, and RPG (Report Program Generator, not the grenade...

GWbasic.

To a ridiculous extent, they're all just languages. You can write good programs, and bad programs, in any of them.

So, in the end, it comes down to how fast / cheaply I can deliver the results a customer is looking for. If the customer already has an array of applications he has to look after in technology A, then using technology A for his problem has to be top of the list.

Well, that's the way I used to think, and I've been doing this for well over thirty years now. In assembler(s) of various ilks, basic(s) likewise, cobol, DL/I, Erlang (nah, just threw that in for the sequence), Fortran... Most recently in Java, Oracle, Perl,

During this year, though, I've stumbled on XQuery and the eXist database. An XQuery can deliver XML, XHTML, or any other variant that's needed. If it's been invoked from a browser it delivers it back to the browser. So, all I need to deliver interactive functionality on a given set of data is a single XQuery (text) document. The change, test and try again cycle comes down to about 60 seconds or less, as all I do is change the text document, save it in the repository, and retry the browser request. If it needs more detailed testing (and, since I'm learning this stuff as I go, it often does) I can drop the source into the eXist XQuery sandbox and work it out line by line.

Now I find myself trying to explain to an organisation with twenty years of dedicated Oracle tradition that it is in fact Oracle that's causing their long decline in agility. Worse, the patent battles playing out before the US courts have stripped the net of uptodate information that would support my cause.

I remember it well. On IBM PC's it was Basic then BasicA and none IBM GWBasic. I wrote a huge amount of code in the 80's in GWBasic; mainly business applications... stock control and the like.

Did anyone else program in Clipper? I did tons of code in that too.

My favourite was 6502 assembler on my Commodore 64. It ran like a dream, so incredibly fast. With a little care I even banked out the operating system and took the RAM that was hidden by the OS ROM and handled the interrupts myself. Happy nerdy days.