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My thoughts about programming languages
My personal thoughts about JavaScript, PHP, Golang, Haskell, and Elixir. Which is the best one?
During the last years, I had the opportunity to experiment with different programming languages.
I really like to learn different languages, approaches, and paradigms. I’m an inquisitive person, and programming languages have always fascinated me.
Every language is different, and here I’d like to add some considerations about what I liked and what I hated about the five languages that I’ve worked with.
- JavaScript
- Haskell
- Go
- PHP
- Elixir
JavaScript
The good
Quick prototyping: JavaScript enables you to write quick and dirty prototypes to validate your ideas. With Node.js, you can even build backend proof of concepts in a minimal amount of time.
Flexibility: with ES6 metaprogramming features (Proxies, Symbols, etc.) JavaScript is becoming a compelling language.
But even if you don’t use those features, it allows you to write some very generic functions and utilize them both on the client, server, and even mobile apps (React Native, for instance).
Community: the JavaScript community is awesome. Every time you have a problem, there’s always someone who asked for that on StackOverflow :D
Jokes apart, the npm registry is an incredible source of useful packages that enables you to write an application using just one language.
Functional programming: as someone may know, in the beginning, JavaScript had to be “a Scheme-like programming language for the browser, but with Java syntax.”
Even if today JavaScript is not a purely functional programming language, it preserves some useful FP features such as higher-order functions, anonymous functions (using arrow functions in ES6+), and so on.
Syntax: the latest versions of JavaScript introduced some syntactic sugars that make it easy to write more readable code. Object/Array destructuring, arrow functions, spread operator, to name a few.
