Programming languages

Quick summary of programming languages.

Assembly

• Terse, but pedantic as fuck
• Based Motorola ASM, so many variants, so much serial port downloading.
• x86 ASM is pretty neat too, also known as PC ASM. Pain in the ass because AT&T is the UNIX standard, and Intel is the DOS standard and they are so close but its the little things that are different. Enough different to be a pain in the dick.

C

• Designed to be a "portable assembly language"
• Very fast, but dangerous to write in because no memory management or bounds checking
• Will teach you a lot about memory and lower level computing
• Used mainly for systems/microcontroller programming
• Small language, with very small standard library

C++

• Very, very large and feature-filled language
• Considered verbose at times
• C, but with OOP on top, and massive set of massive libraries.
• Considered dangerous to write in because, like C, there is no memory management
• Almost as fast as C

C#

• What Java should have been
• Runs on .NET or the Mono framework
• Is very similar to Java, with some extra stuff borrowed from C++

Java

• Very portable; compiling down to bytecode, which is then executed by the JVM
• Object oriented language
• Very large and enterprise
• Huge libraries and a lot of software is written in it
• Very verbose APIs
• Receives a lot of undue criticism
• Can be convoluted to write in sometimes
• Is made fun of for the design patterns people use with it, and for the verbose naming schemes often used

Haskell

• Executable math. Math is 2hard. You do the math.
• Monads end up infecting everything. Fuck monads.

Lisp

• Family of functional programming languages.
• Roughly as old as, if not older, than C.
• Changes the way you will think about how you write code in other languages, because of the different paradigm

Python

• Very easy to read and simple (and fun) to write
• Kinda slow
• Uses whitespace indentation to separate logical blocks
• Excellent for scripting
• Considered the antithesis of Perl

Ruby

• Focus on programmer happiness
• Fully object-oriented
• Elegant, readable code
• As slow as any dynamic language will be
• Excellent for general-purpose programming, scripting, text processing and web dev
• Best of Perl without the Rest of Perl

Erlang

• Makes concurrency/multithread shit a breeze.
• Uses a specialised VM that has a hard time crunching numbers, and an even harder time handling strings.

BASIC

• >It can do anything C can do, guise!!1
• Lots of property implementations, only a few decent FOSS ones.
• Still slower than C
• >muh goto