Which programming language/environment is more “powerful” than people realize?

Not a software tool, but a notebook. Writing what you are going to code/design has saved me countless times. Some "easy" problems turned out to have a lot of edge cases, some hard problems became much easier to approach when I wrote down what made them hard.

Diagrams are far easier to draw on paper. Drawing data structures and flows makes it easier to debug edge cases. Drawing system diagrams helps to identify possible bottlenecks while scaling or possible points of failure.

Also, the notebook doubles down as a To-do list. It is a lot more satisfying to cross-out a task physically than in any app. And it always stays on my desk so there is no question of closing the tab / forgetting to update it.

Most importantly, you can flip through it and have a look at why you made some decision while coding or designing. Also, you can draw doodles when bored :)

Might be too mainstream of an answer, but I still get surprised sometimes about what CSS offers without needing JavaScript. Animations/transitions can all be written without the need for JS. New features like variables, flexbox and CSS grid are making CSS even easier to use.

The combo of HTML/CSS is what has made the web so enduring and durable. It is why so many technologies are now "Make desktop apps with HTML/CSS" (Electron) and "Make mobile apps with HTML/CSS" (React Native, Ionic). HTML/CSS is just one of the best ways to make a solid UI.

AWK

It can do anything with delimited data tables with millions of rows in a few lines of code, as fast as a Go, C counterpart program.

In Python you need to write lots of lines, use third-party libraries to normalize columns with regex, dropping rows, etc. In AWK, it's just a one liner, or you can write it in an *.awk file as well.

AWK is a secret gem for dealing with big data.

Update:

I share my AWK script where I normalize a millions of lines long delimited CSV table only with AWK, as fast as a Go counterpart program:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

# This block only runs once at the start, before the first line
# Use this to print CSV header on the top
BEGIN {
    FS="|"; # input field separator
    OFS="|"; # output field separator
}

# This block runs at every line
{
    # We will order a new named variable to every column
    line = $0; # variable `$0` stores the entire line
    url = $1;
    title = $2;
    body = $3
    tags = $4;

    if (line ~ /^$/) next; # if line is blank, then skip it
    if (NF != 4) next; # if column count is not equal to 4, then skip the line

    # Skip any line where tags column contains the word "cars"
    if (index(tags, "cars") != 0) { next; }

    # Normalize the url column with regex by only keeping the article id
    # Example input: <a href="https://example.com/article/foo123456">Hello</a>
    gsub(/.*example\.com\/article\/|[\042].*/, "", url); # outputs: foo123456

    # Skip lines that has non-alphanumeric characters in url column (like <>#&@)
    # Skip lines that has empty url column (after gsub normalization)
    # Skip lines where url starts with foo or bar
    if (url !~ /[[:alnum:]]/ ||
        length(url) == 0 ||
        url ~ /^foo|^bar/) {
        next;
    }

    # Replace multiple ; with one (needed for errorless CSV import in Postgres)
    gsub(/[\073]+/, ";", tags);

    # Print the line with OFS, aka: profit! :)
    print url, title, body, tags;
}

PHP.

It usually gets a bad rap about being horribly ugly and difficult to work with, but that's just old PHP and Wordpress. Modern PHP frameworks like Laravel are amazingly powerful and pleasant to work with. And when you use PHP as a proper OOP language rather than for templating, it works a lot like a dynamic Java with some nice constructs for server-side development.

It also has the most powerful built-in datetime parser of any language I've used; it correctly parses just about anything you throw at it without needing to give it any kind of format string, which is great for parsing user input.

Python.

While people on this platform definitely use python properly, (the people on) Reddit defines it as pseudocode. I shouldn't take Reddit seriously, but python definitely is more powerful than just 'pseudocode'. Meaning that a language is easy to pickup does not mean it is not powerful.

Oh, and the 'import feature' meme is true, but isn't that it for any language?

Sorry, I'm really triggered by reddit

For the "credit part" I think is Bash. The entire internet works because of it, including all the new shiny Continuous Deployment pipelines.

As for powerful ... depends with who you're talking to, choose the ones that they do not know anything about and they will be surprised. Now days mostly pure FP languages like Haskell, Java/C# are importing FP goodies and their devs still think it's OOP magic.

Any language. People usually critics a language without really knowing it, and any language has some features really outstanding compared to competitors.

I feel like a lot of people don't realize how powerful Lisp dialects and Haskell are. I use Haskell almost on a daily basis and I would say it's the best language I tried so far. Both are so expressive, my programs take up mostly half the space I'd have used with a mainstream language

Go Lang.

powerful, great performance and friendly syntax.

You probably expected this, but I'm gonna say Perl 6. Released two years ago, it's an incredibly expressive and powerful language, which includes all major paradigms: object-oriented, functional, concurrent. It's got peerless Unicode support, and a small, but welcoming and helpful community. You should definitely give it a try, whether you want to learn a new language, or want to look at a full-featured 21st century language.

I believe JavaScript deserves more accolades than it's already getting. It can efficiently be used on both the front end and back end, it's kind of like the Thanos of Programming with its multiple frameworks which allows more functionality to it, and the addition of popular trends like Tensorflow.js and Machine Learning.js kind of give it an edge on Python

I could have say "Rust" as it is extremely powerful, but it would be obvious (since I am a big fan of it) and I believe alot of people already know it. So I'll got for proper env study and team awareness. Some thinks that PHP is a bad tool (I do), some that it is C# (I do too), and other that it's javascript (I do not). I disagree with that (including with my first reaction to those language). The good tool is the one fitting for the task "in the best capacity and will of the team" you are working with. For example, lets say that you wanna write a server application and your team knows JS. The best tool will be JS. On the other side, to do an app to do machine learning, JS would not necessarily be my first choice.
Same with C#, I dislike it (for numerous reason) but my team wanted to use unity. And it worked. So the debate are some tools bad are good are only relevant to the situation I believe. The awareness of context is then the most powerful tool I know.

And I took too long to make my point, sorry.

Git.

Not a programming language, but I think it's worth mentioning. Sometimes we just commit and push, but it's possible to rename commits, reorder, fix extremely difficult conflicts, find where/when a bug was introduced, create hooks, etc.

We should take some time, learn Git and see how powerful it is, instead of just throwing off our local and pulling the remote repo again after the first issue :D

There's no tool more powerful to me than great online documentation. Moreso than online question forums like stack overflow, which is a close second for me. If I can't find good docs for something, I don't use it, because I'm searching the docs on the tools I use at least three times a day. I remember a quote from Richard Feynmann taking a Anatomy class: