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Discussion on: What is your favourite programming language and what do you like the most of it?

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Rebecca Skinner

Although I work with many different languages, both professionally and in my personal projects, Haskell is my favorite language. Although there are a lot of things I love about haskell (and some things that aren't so great), the thing that keeps me coming back to the language, and so engaged with it, is that of all the languages that I know, it's the one that best allows me to express the problem I want to express precisely. Many other languages either force me to deal with a lot of stuff that isn't relevant to my problem, because they aren't expressive enough to allow me to abstract those concerns away, or else the languages try to hide those extraneous concerns behind a pile of assumptions that may not be a good fit for my precise problem. Beyond the expressiveness, I love that haskell allows me to write both reasonably performant code, as well as very cleanly abstracted code- often at the same time but if not it allows me to cleanly separate out my performance-centric code from the rest of my abstractions. Finally, there are no other languages that I can use for every day production use that give me the level of confidence that haskell gives me in my ability to grow, refactor and change the program without the risk of introducing either functional regressions (unit tests always miss something) or else getting myself into a big problem with the architecture of the application such that I'm forced to either being to accumulate a lot of technical debt around the application architecture or else I have to do large scale structural refactoring to continue making progress with the program.