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What would the programming language sorting hat pick for you, and why?

Ben Halpern on September 22, 2019

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Matt Eland

Turbo Pascal. I'm old enough to remember using it and loving it, it's a 'teaching language' which fits my mentoring bent, and darn it if I still don't think in therms of := for object assignment from time to time.

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Paul Michaels

Turbo Pascal is definitely the best language (actually, the best language is Spectrum Basic - but I'm the first to admit it did have some tiny flaws)! To this day, I still haven't seen a better colour scheme in an IDE. If I'm not mistaken, the guys from Borland that designed it now work for MS on C#.

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saint4eva

He works with Microsoft. But as of 2019, he is in charge of Typescript - another great language like C#

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Matt Eland

Yep, I love my .NET and TypeScript. There are plenty of others I want to get into, but at the moment, this is where I focus.

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Don Morris

I used turbo pascal in the 80s, I loved it. I felt empowered by it.

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Matt Eland

And it did its job as a learning language. After coding in Turbo Pascal for awhile, I went on a family vacation, read a book on C++ cover to cover, and came back and could code in C++ without issues. Prior to Turbo Pascal as a stepping stone, that couldn't have happened.

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Don Morris

I went from turbo pascal to lightspeed/ think pascal to build Mac apps. I then used sams c and c++ primers to learn those and started building Mac apps in c and then c++.

I can remember in the late 80s VIP - visual interactive programming and how they were saying we wouldn’t be developing code using text editing in the future. Here I am in 2019 still editing software in text editors. Welcome to the future. 😀

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John McCabe

Well, Pascal was designed as a teaching language. Turbo Pascal was one of many non-standard extensions to standard (ISO/IEC?) Pascal which contributed to the decision to create Ada. Personally, I found Vax Pascal was better, but obviously not for MS-DOS!

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Dan Conn

Turbo Pascal was the first proper language that I learnt! I loved it!

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Matt Eland

I went QBasic to VB for Dos, and tried C++ next but it was too much for me as a teen so I learned Turbo Pascal and then C++, C#, Java, XAML, JavaScript, TypesScript, and F#.

I actually wound up teaching a lot of my class Turbo Pascal. We ended our semester building a game together using Borland Graphical Interface for Turbo Pascal.

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Dan Conn

I mucked around with BASIC as a small kid , then Turbo Pascal from 13, played with 8086 assembler a bit and then did HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Java, XML / XSLT, XQuery, and Python.

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Patrick D. Taylor • Edited

Pascal is a language.
Turbo Pascal is the name of the Pascal editor made by Borland.
Borland also made Turbo C++ editor.

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John McCabe

FWIW, Turbo Pascal included the environment, tools and numerous non-standard extensions to Pascal so, to some extent, was a language in its own right. Standard Pascal at the time was pretty much useless for serious programming since, as mentioned, Pascal was not designed for that. Turbo Pascal essentially morphed into Delhi.

There was also Turbo Prolog.

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Dan Conn

OK so when I signed up for pottermore.com I was chosen to be Ravenclaw! So what language best suits this.......

Python, being a snake surely is Team Slytherin so not that one.

Haskell favours purity - definitely Team Slytherin too.

If you've ever setup a Java enterprise project then this belongs to a house which values hard work, patience and loyalty - so Team Hufflepuff.

XML is clearly Slytherin too.

This is not going well......

So I guess with Ravenclaw's virtues of being intelligent, wise, sharp, witty, individual, then it has to be a language with a sense of humour, that is unique in it's style and needs a fair amount of effort to read. Yup, gotta be Brainfuck!

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Zaid Rehman

intelligent, wise, sharp, witty, individual ...

All this sounds like JavaScript

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Matt Eland

BF seems like hufflepuff to me.

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Dan Conn

Well, then you'd be wrong 😂😂🤤

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Simon Massey • Edited

Rust because it is a safe language without a garbage collector with advanced features like async/await yet it also compiles to webassembly so you can write isomorphic webapps in it chinedufn.github.io/percy/ or speed up bits of an electron app youtu.be/lLzFJenzBng It is also the most loved language on the annual stackoverflow survey with a great community youtu.be/FSrQX4uYuOM

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Chris James • Edited

So you would say when the sorting hat is put on your head that it says

  • Simon likes to pick up trash all the time and be very particular about it
  • Simon is very popular
  • Simon... is a web app?
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Simon Massey

Totally!

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Nested Software

You like to keep your code honest, straightforward, and explicit about what it's doing. You're not the biggest fan of mucking about with low-level details. Python is the language for you!

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Chris James • Edited

I think it's pretty wild how many of the comments seem to miss the point of the article and just talk about why their favourite programming language is the best.

For me:

I own a Slytherin scarf and give dirty looks to other houses when I walk around platform 9 and 3/4 on my way to work which implies a like of purity and the dark arts. So Scala for me.

Note: Not my favourite language!

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Nicholas Stimpson

Not answered, but then I've no idea what a sorting hat does.

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Bruce Axtens • Edited

Hmm ... prescriptive counseling. Too easy to blame the hat for bad outcomes. Think I'll give it a miss.

Besides, I'm never happy with my current language. I'm learning Crystal, Kotlin, Scala and Prolog (amongst others) on exercism.io. The hat would probably tell me to go back to doing User Support.

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engmms

Hi,we are from same Generation
I am start with GW Basic and Know try with Kotlin and Flutter

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Harsh Shandilya • Edited

Thanks for the link to Exercism! Didn't know about it and it looks like exactly what I was looking for :)

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saint4eva

C# because it is a general purpose language with both functional and OOP capabilities.

 
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Brian Ng

Perhaps the first impression is hard to change. The color is vibrant and traditional lol

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Riccardo Bernardini • Edited

Ada forever. I just love its robustness and how you can write software maintainable and that requires 10% of the usual debugging time (note: not 10% less). This, of course, if you help the compiler helping you.

It gives you a full array of tools for safe programming: from basic strong typing, to multi-task builtin (I saw a multitask software running on a Lego mindstorm with 16 bit CPU and a handful of RAM), from contracts to formal checking, up to tools for multi-core systems and distributed programming. I was told that the new version (due in 2020) will also have parallel loops and "pointer ownership" (to allow formal checking with software that uses pointers).

Oh, yes, and portability too... Few years ago we developed a library for P2P video streaming that was, more or less, 1Mbyte of source code. During the development we always worked on Linux. When it was ready, we copied the sources to a Windows machine, compiled them and... it just run, without the need of a "./config", nor a single conditional compilation.

If you know Pascal, Ada looks a lot like Pascal, but it is much more suitable for real application (as far as I know, Pascal was designed as a teaching language)

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Johan Alkstål

Dart because I like multiplatform development, good type support that's there when I need it, a sound ecosystem that just works and something that is powerful but feels like a breeze.

Seriously, Dart is a great programming language. Biggest downside is that it's mostly used by Google alone.

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KAcper Perschke

First I have to mention briefly my history:

  • Basic (Sinclair & Armstrad/Schneider)
  • Fortran (77 & Lahey version of 90)
  • Bash
  • awk
  • sql
  • Informix 4GL
  • Borland Delphi (i.e. Turbo Pascal on steroids)
  • Perl 5.…
  • Python (2.6 & 2.7)
  • ruby (only scratched)
  • ecmascript (node executed)
  • go (1.9 & 1.12)

Among them Perl was only one I was able to think in.

Go seems very nice.
Perl 6 is promising but would not gain popularity.

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Lorraine Lee

I totally think in SQL

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Richard Lenkovits

He's nasty. He'd pick perl because he knows that I can't decide to hate it or love it. :D

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Nested Software • Edited

Not perl! Not perl! Not perl!...
Are you sure? I sense you can do great things with perl. Terrible things. But great...

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Richard Lenkovits

Exactly XD

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Michael Maitoza

I only know a little javascript so I'm sure that would have to be it. But, then again, it would probably throw me altogether in another direction and give me C#. Who knows? I'm really a not very good at programming (I do more HTML and CSS) so I guess if the hat really knew me it would go down the path of least resistance being javascript.

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Kozmi

The path of JavaScript is more treacherous than you realize. Many dangers ahead, few survive.
I think hat would choose python for you.

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Michael Maitoza

Very interesting! Tell me more... I'm new to the programming side and have basically been spending all my time on front-end dev stuff. I honestly have never looked at Python, partially because I am afraid of snakes. Lol. I have tried PHP and I kind of disliked it. I turned out a lot of messy code with it though. That was many moons though. Many moons ago.

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Michael Maitoza

I have been playing around in Python for a few weeks and absolutely love it! The hat would have most definitely picked this one for me, even if I am totally afraid of reptiles. Lol.

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Holy-Elie Scaïde

C.
The first language I learned was Python, but C is the one I love. I'm using JS at work but C will be always the one I prefer.
There's nothing more I like than writing C.

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forrest_svc

Want to develop fast and run fast, with built in garage collection? Golang!

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David MM👨🏻‍💻

I came to ask the same, adding "Strongly typed" to the mix.

And you confirmed what I had on my mind :)

P.S: How Go is on the embedded world?

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forrest_svc

Super good point. That I can’t answer to, but I’ll do some digging!

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Christian Melgarejo

Check out tinygo

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Nihar Raote

I work better with many of the things I require being available out of the box. Solutions without any algorithms or design patterns. The sorting hat is definitely going to pick Java for me.

(I use JavaScript now and don't use Java anymore)

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seanthorpe

Clearly some languages are past the sorting hat and are straight up servants of "He who should not be named". HTML+CSS+JavaScript are one such chimera serving the dark lord.

The productive but simple languages with good IDE's would go in one house together. Turbo Pascal, VB6, Flash/Flex/AS3, Visual Basic.NET... sounds like Gryffindor to me.

Only in this world... Voldemort won.

 
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Paul Michaels

Never said I wasn't weird :-)

It's a bit like watching a sit-com that you grew up with. You should never watch it again, because it's not as good as you remember it.

At the time, we used to create buttons using ANSI characters - Windows was just something you ran when you wanted to play minesweeper.

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seanthorpe

The IDE helps makes the language productive, or torture. It also makes it pretty or ugly to work with. Borland was onto something in those days.

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Andrew Meredith

Well, let's see. I try to be terse, but sometimes I'm just incoherent. I'm pragmatic, but I'm always a bit behind the times.

Perl.

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Alex Lohr

Nowadays, I write mostly TypeScript and love every moment of it, but sometimes, I wonder if the sorting hat would put me down as a Rustacean... even though I could partner up with Lua Lovegood while speaking Python.

 
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Brian Ng

This argument is not quite correct for the integrated dev environment like Turbo Pascal, It'll be a bit weird if somebody will use another editor then using command line for building. I mean he is in love with the intergrated feeling of development.

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engmms

C++ My first love in Programming,in second year in My Faculty
we use it to demonstrate Jobs in Memory (Operating System Track)
and we use it to Solving Numerical problems (Mathematics Track)
Suez Canal University,Faculty Of Science from (1995 to 1999)
really Great Days

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AxelleDRouge

So I learned programming with Java, nice and sturdy but so strict, in my perception. I played with PHP and C, as well as python but not enough to really appreciate them.
Javascript is my love <3 it's a whole world full of unknown and possibilities. You need to be brave and to have a thirst for exploring to discover all its many librairies and tools. Gryffindor! Of course, a little of Ravenclaw and even Slytherin are necessary, a thirst for knowledge,a cunning to slyther around the pittfall around the corners, when you can't tackle them head on, and the ambition to rise and become even a fullstack developer able to do whatever I want with it!
Btw, I'm a big Harry Potter fan :p

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Javier Guerra

ActionScript3.0

In a distant future when machines rule the world, the only hope for humanity is to inject a flash player into the Main-frame and inject an "spank the monkey" advertising banner to destroy our tyrants integrity.

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Lorraine Lee • Edited

I'm not sure how to interpret the question, but I'll go with the metaphor that the J.O.B. market is the hat, so ifwhen I demonstrate skills at an astonishing enough level to be worth paying, then I will drop everything else in pursuit of the deep study of whatever language is that of the J.O.B. on offer.

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Reid

Hmmm.

Unobtrusive, likes to get things done but maybe not the quickest about it, friendly once you get to know me but I take a while to warm up to?

I'm going to have to say Ruby.

I don't like Ruby.

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Jariullah Safi

Rust.

Because I assume the sorting hat wants me to stay sane

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Kozmi

Not a safe assumption. The hat can sense what trials you need to grow

 
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Brian Ng

:D I meant to original comment's is his impression, under the context when Turbo Pascal still shine. Why do we need to argue things by our opinion about his on this? LoL weird.

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Miroslav Glamuzina

JavaScript, definitely. It was one of my first languages I've learned. With it getting a lot of attention recently, it really is keeping things interesting.

 
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Matt Eland

TypeScript is my favorite language, but I really miss the full power of .NET and LINQ in particular. I tend to do Angular and TypeScript on the UI and .NET Core API on the back end.

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BaGRoS

Action! for Atari65xe.
Most things I wrote in assembler, but more complicated loops in Action! and I used dissassembler to rewrite. Action! generated a clean machine code, just like the assembler.

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Andrew Harpin

Ok opening a can of worms.

IMO a programming language has to be compiled and not require an engine to operate.

Anything else is a scripting language.

For me it's C.

Awaiting the 🔥

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Erlang erlang erlang!

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Sanket Chaudhary

JavaScript. Because it is the language of present and future. Eventually, all the stuff, apps will move to browser. Every task can be done by this functional programming language.

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Brian Ng

That is just your opinion. Language for the web, but for the performance bits, we need wasm.

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hoshimotao

Javascript - since it is basically the only real programming language I know. Lol I dont consider html and css languages.

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Maxime Bouveron

Ruby.

In life in general, I'm big on things that provide a better experience (or at least try) but that nobody uses (like trackballs for instance).

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Matt Ellen

Haskell: I'm clever but no good in the real world.

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Uday Korlimarla

I would pick python for it's simplicity & JavaScript because the entire web runs on it's basis.

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Charly S.

Turbo Pascal.. yes!. I mean I'm even programming in Delphi right now :)

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Max Ong Zong Bao

The traveller of languages from what is old became new and what is new became old

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Christian Melgarejo

Gophindor!

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Lorraine Lee

I would hope Ruby, but I'm open to suggestions.

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SivaMaxwell

So many thoughts in so little time. No time to manage all that stuff in long paragraphs. Time to bring the Alchemy...

Python.

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SivaMaxwell

Well, pottermore.com choose 'Slytherin'. There's that...

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Tammy Lee

SLYTHERI— Oh, wait.

JavaScript.