What is your favorite programming language to program on *nix? - Programming On Unix

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gmk
Long time nixers
I used to be a big python guy. Recently I've started to use (and like!) golang a lot more, I think this is because sometimes python is just too slow. Rust also looks interesting.
wolf
Members
C, I guess.
But I'm still very stupid. God have mercy of me.
venam
Administrators
Oh, the age old question of what's your favorite programming language.

With the years it has come to whatever does the trick the quickest and without too much hassle.
Sometimes it's a simple shell script, sometimes it's Perl, sometimes it's Python, sometimes it's C, sometimes it's C++, sometimes it's Java. I alternate between them depending on the scenario.
I have favorites but they are for specific tasks and not for generic *nix programming.
Now if you asked me what syntax or ideologies of programming I liked better and which language would fit that then I would also say that it depends on what I'm trying to do.

TLDR: Whatever works works.
jkl
Long time nixers
Python is for people who hate programming. Python developers aren't real developers with their mandatory whitespace syntax and their requirements.txt boilerplate. YMMV. ;-)

I, personally, usually prefer C and/or Lisp, but it surely depends on the task to solve. Generally I agree with venam here: Whatever works works. I just happen to prefer efficient compilers.

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<mort> choosing a terrible license just to be spiteful towards others is possibly the most tux0r thing I've ever seen
z3bra
Grey Hair Nixers
C is always a good choice, as this is the only one deeply integrated into the OS (/lib, /include, ld.so, ...).
evbo
Members
This question is highly subjective, but I guess that's the point

My basic rule for picking languages is as follows:

Scripting: Perl if I can, Python if I must.
Programs: Go for concurrency or web. C if I can, C++ if I must.
Day job: C# all day, every day. Hooray state government. (C# is actually pretty great, my complaint lies in that any alternative stack is not allowed even when it would make sense for the problem we're trying to solve.. but I just do what the boss man says)
jkl
Long time nixers
(01-04-2019, 12:36 PM)evbo Wrote: Go for concurrency or web. C if I can

What is missing for you to use C for concurrency or web?

--
<mort> choosing a terrible license just to be spiteful towards others is possibly the most tux0r thing I've ever seen
evbo
Members
Part of it is that I prefer the flow of goroutines and channels, part of it is that concurrency in C is difficult while concurrency in Go is so easy even a moron like me can do it. Take your pick on what's more important

Same goes for web; Go's http library is dead simple, libcurl has a ton of boilerplate that I always have to lookup how to do. Admittedly, I haven't written any C + libcurl in years so I'm not sure if things have changed. I also have never learned how to use something like BCHS.

Now all that being said, I needed a simple customized TCP server to handle data being sent to a server and C + POSIX sockets was quick and easy. Thanks Beej!
prx*
Members
1. shell for most things, using sed/awk/cut is most of the time enough
2. go for web or mail parsing
3. C for everything else.

I used to do a lot of python, but its sooo big and have a hube standard library (to much). So I rewrite code in C now and regret to do this so late.
z3bra
Grey Hair Nixers
I can see more and more "real life" programs in go, and I can't help but think "how can people accept such a weird runtime configuration" like the $GOPATH thing et al.
How do you deal with it in production ?
evbo
Members
My previous comment mentioned my current job is at a .NET shop, but we do have a couple small internal services written in Go. For those, we use Go's mod feature so that you don't need a $GOPATH, which thankfully Pike and co have decided to move away from.

`go build` produces a single executable containing the runtime, libraries, and application code (as long as the libraries are pure go, the C FFI is a whole different animal). The executable is then ran as a service on a server, no need to install any runtime server-side.

As an aside, I always had a strong dislike for the whole $GOPATH thing, and I'm glad that go's maintainers have come up with a system to replace it.
z3bra
Grey Hair Nixers
This sound interresting indeed, would you have any link to this "mod feature" ?
evbo
Members
https://blog.golang.org/modules2019 is a pretty good overview
stilbruch
Registered
I try to use C as much as I can, but usually I'm just trying to hack something together and the extra effort isn't worth it. Back in my Minecraft plugin development days I used to use Java (oh god), Kotlin and Scala. Scala was a very nice language, I was very much in love with functional programming, but it was much too slow to compile.