Of all the major languages used in academia and business, which one is the most productive, and why?

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Of all the major languages used in academia and business, which one is the most productive, and why?

As the question says, which language is easiest and most productive for you, and importantly why?

Given that the reason why should be convincing it could have a definitive conclusion, and is therefore a valid question. I am looking for suggestions with regard to learning languages generally, and whether to pick up one language over another.

Thanks, be great to hear what you have to say.

Edit: In case anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages**

English

I don't know about easy, but its got to be the most productive language I've ever learned. Its the closest thing to an international standard we have. I don't know what I'd without it.

CrazyJugglerDrummer 2010-09-07 00:22:54

@CrazyJugglerDrummer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages

AlexW 2010-09-07 00:24:34

If I remember correctly, English is the third most spoken language in the world. So, actually, it's *not* "the closest thing to an international standard we have" since there are two other languages which are an even closer thing to an international standard.

Jörg W Mittag 2010-09-07 00:43:47

Wikipedia suggests that English is spoken by roughly 1.8 billion people and is the most widely spoken (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_language), so I guess it is the closest thing we have... not that it's likely that the world will standardise on one language anytime soon ;-)

Peter 2010-09-07 04:53:47

@Peter: Interesting. I must have misremembered the statistics. It was probably about native speakers, where English does actually come in at number 3. Thanks to your link, I learned something new today: my language is spoken by as many non-native speakers as natives. I didn't know that. (Of course, it doesn't come close to English, where only one in five speakers is native.)

Jörg W Mittag 2010-09-08 00:33:13

+1 A:

Funny. I was thinking about this just today. I think the answer is... wait for it... Javascript/ECMAScript.

The rationale is simply that it is so ubiquitous today. It is found in virtually every browser, mobile or otherwise, its found in widget-engines, Flash (ActionScript) and probably more other places than I even know about.

Moreover, it is a surprisingly rich language and is simply to use for beginners and yet can be wielded to do some pretty amazing things by the experts.

As applications move off the desktop and into the browser, it is/will be Javascript powering them. And, with technologies such as GWT coming of age, we're just getting started.

Now that it is essentially one of the 3 legs of the Web now (HTML/CSS/JS), I strongly feel that JavaScript will be the code that makes the John Gage's vision: The Network Is the Computer come true.

mkoistinen 2010-09-07 00:23:34

Er... I thought you were asking about computer languages... this is StackOverflow and all!

mkoistinen 2010-09-07 00:25:18

So what you're saying is, if someone can standardise in-browser Python then we can finally be rid of Javascript ;-)

Steve Jessop 2010-09-07 00:27:54

@mkoistinen: I thought he was too; my comment was a joke. Now, I'm not so sure.

Michael Petrotta 2010-09-07 00:29:34

Personally I think the future is compiled jQuery style libraries inside of browsers...

AlexW 2010-09-07 00:29:39

"We're always striving for simplicity, continuously raising the level of abstraction," - John Gage

AlexW 2010-09-07 00:37:49

@AlexW, I'm a huge jQuery fan, and I think it will always have a place, but I think that GWT is going to be huge. Strangely, Javascript is going to end-up a sort of unreadable byte-code to be JIT'ed by V8 or whatever engine your browser has.

mkoistinen 2010-09-07 00:45:31

@mkoistinen - I think you're right, but until JS works at compiled code speeds, performance will be a major drawback. And then you run into Operating System troubles, unless a JavaScript "virtual machine" existed in a browser (something like Flash but for JS).

AlexW 2010-09-07 00:58:36

@AlexW, "we" have been saying things like that for years. The fact is, we just build faster, more powerful computers. My money says that JS will be what most applications are built upon... soon.

mkoistinen 2010-09-07 01:06:04

@mkoistinen - the browser is the key I think. Someone one day will create a great platform for compiled websites. If every web page was compiled after downloading, into machine language (including all JS and HTML), plus whatever framework to hold it all together, the DOM could work a lot quicker, as it will be run natively instead of via the interpreter.

AlexW 2010-09-07 01:40:28

I find that English works well because it's a good common base language for communication, although those who speak other languages can often bring different insights that are possible with the differences that each language has and the effect on the thought processes.

Richard Harrison 2010-09-07 00:23:39

I think that depends on what you want to do, where you want to live and who you wants to know.

IMO It's never bad to know too many languages. If you're aiming to live in Europe and work here and all that, then, Dutch, French, Spanish are good start. If you're aiming to live and work in Asia, perhaps Chinese mandarin and Cantonese and Japanese would be a good start.

Nowadays, everyone knows English. But if you want to go further than everyone, do some languages I suggested.

jdnhldn 2010-09-07 00:32:07

Ok but I am actually talking about programming languages here. As a suggestion for future self-learning etc.

AlexW 2010-09-07 00:35:02

+1 A:

I'm afraid the question is close to meaningless. I just don't believe there's a meaningful comparison between, say, JavaScript and SQL. I have a hard time imagining anything that would be reasonable in one that wouldn't be pretty horrendous in the other. I can't quite imagine a database server that used JS as its native query language, nor can I quite imagine attempting to do things like screening user inputs with SQL.

It's reasonable to attempt to compare productivity across languages that can/could reasonably be put to (at least close to) the same purposes, but when you'd never even consider writing similar code with both, a comparison of productivity is meaningless.

Jerry Coffin 2010-09-07 01:57:15

@Jerry Coffin - I see what you mean, and of course it's true, why (or how) would you query a relational database using JS? But in practical web-programmer terms, even SQL retrieved data is very often manipulated using JSON (or XML) when deployed for a web interface. I suppose the question is for web-programmers.

AlexW 2010-09-07 02:32:35

@AlexW: That's a lot more restricted than what was in the question -- but even so it's close to meaningless. There are still only a *few* places you can make direct comparisons that really mean much.

Jerry Coffin 2010-09-07 03:11:29

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Of all the major languages used in academia and business, which one is the most productive, and why?

English

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