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Jan Wedel
Jan Wedel

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What Is Your Main Language?

I am following The Practical Dev and dev.to for quite some time and had the impression, that this great community consists of a majority of frontend and scripting language developers. I was more than happy, that my article about Modern Java Development gained some attention.

Now I am curious to know, What is you main programming language and what are you using it for?

Top comments (103)

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cat profile image
Cat • Edited

Vanilla Javascript, however, I'm shopping around for a library or framework. I'm looking at React for obvious reasons * coughiworkatfbcough * but I've recently been Ruby on Rails-curious since I've heard it mentioned a lot on Learn to Code With Me and Code Newbie podcasts.

TL;DR: since JS was my first language, I equate new programming languages with what I know in JS. So yeaaaah. Vanilla JS.

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Jan van Brügge

You may want to take a look at Cycle.js if you are interested in functional programming. Found it, used it, then joined the team

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Ben Halpern

Ruby is my main language. I code in other stuff as well, but I'd call myself a Rubyist at heart.

dev.to is built with love and Ruby. ❤️

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stealthmusic profile image
Jan Wedel

What did you do before dev.to?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Immediately before dev.to I was building a messaging dashboard with Node, and before that it was a marketplace app in Rails.

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Pierre Bouillon

Python here ! For tasks automation and APIs, but for pretty much everything else too.

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Souk Syp.

Moonscript(Lua), especially with Lapis + Openresty for backend and rest API. For the frontend, vanilla Javascript with frameworks like React help me build prototypes faster. Because Moonscript and Javascript are so alike, I learn one for two.

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Jan Wedel

Interesting. What kind of apps (as in domain) are you building with Moonscript?

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Souk Syp.

A news web app (naneung.com/) and a web note editor that translate karaoke into lao, currently in development.

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Souk Syp. • Edited

To illustrate what I'm doing...
Typr

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stealthmusic profile image
Jan Wedel

Fancy! karaoke? 🎤
Reminds me of using Pinyin for Chinese...

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Souk Syp.

Yes. Karaoke is the most popular language among millenials in Laos for chatting.

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Valentin Baca

Java for the front and backend: serverless on AWS Lambda with an Android client. In the near past I was using Java for web servers using Spring & Tomcat.

I've been learning Python on my own time, but putting that on pause while I pickup Objective-C and Swift for iOS at work.

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Jan Wedel

In what field are you working?

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Valentin Baca

I work for a website that sells books :)

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Casey Brooks

Most of the code I write at work is in Java, but more and more I am replacing my Java side projects with Kotlin.

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Jan Wedel

And what kind of SW are you building?

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Casey Brooks

I'm a consultant so the specific projects/technologies change frequently at work, but my current project is a large Android application. A lot of my side projects are also Android apps, but the big thing I'm working on is Orchid, a new static site generator. The core is still in Java, but I've been building all its many plugins in Kotlin.

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Jan Wedel

Nice. I’m also tempted to start with Kotlin. But as I had the same feeling when Scala came out, I’m waiting if the hype will last...

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Casey Brooks

Yeah, I had similar concerns for a while, but when Google announced first-class Android Kotlin support, I decided to take the plunge. I think the support of Google and Jetbrains, both large and influential companies in the Java space, give Kotlin an edge that other JVM languages do not have.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

Jasmine, a testing framework for Javascript, since my job is software QA. I use Protractor and supertest with it to test Angular front ends and REST APIs.

Mocha would have worked for those, too, but Jasmine is a tad more straight forward. If more people were reading my spec files, I'd consider switching.

Personal projects then end up using Angular or vanillaJS, but I'm itching to get back into Python to do something data related.

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Jan Wedel

Are you only write tests? In my team, we also develop angular apps, but all testing from unit to E2E UI tests is done by our developers. Do you really see a need to have a separate QA?

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ItsASine (Kayla)

At my location (one office of a larger organization), they try to maintain a 2:1 dev:QA ratio within teams. Devs write unit tests for their code and then QA writes the integration and E2E tests for the app as a whole.

In theory, this allows for devs to focus on deving and QAs to not be as tied to the code so they’re able to catch things better (going off of the spec rather than what the implementation does).

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Jan Wedel

In theory

So, does it work in your opinion? I mean in terms of quality and also team responsibility? I would assume that it will end up in a situation where “they” write the bugs while “them” alway being to picky.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

I’ve been on teams where it’s been siloed between dev and QA, and there has been a bit of infighting amongst those who find bugs and those who write code. It’s never been hostile just certainly a sense of otherness.

Most teams, though, if QA and dev are integrated then there’s no issue with that. Like, don’t have QA site bunched together away from dev, don’t have QA only lunches, etc. If everyone acts as a team, there’s no otherness.

Biggest issue I have with it is that I’m bored more often than not. Once I set up the initial framework, it’s a whole lot of waiting on dev to implement features for me to E2E test. 2:1 is good when a project is spinning up fast, but I think they need to revisit how many QAs are needed when a project is more in a sustaining pace. If the devs are working on infestructure or tech debt, I’ve got nothing to do.

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Pietro Bongiovanni

My main work-language is PHP. I started introducing some Golang at my company and we've built some stuff using it.

At heart I am still a C developer though, the first language I ever learnt (CompSci 101) and the one I tend to have most fun with.

I want to move more definitely to Golang but still having to maintain a lot of PHP projects I can't really run away from it, plus I've become so used to Laravel that whenever I want to start a new personal projects I can have an API with two/three end points ready in an hour so that's fun :)

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Dan Homola

TypeScript using React and React Native. I began my software engineering career with C# but have since moved towards front end. I’ve been using TypeScript for three years and I still love it, it gets better with every version!

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Fabian Holzer

I work in the healthcare sector, with the particular focus of our business unit being hospital information systems.

For the applications I'm working on Java is the predominant backend language and we build our UI with TypeScript (Angular).

I do both backend and UI development, but the latter consumes about 80% of my time, which therefore makes TypeScript my main language.

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Shayne Boyer

This is always an interesting topic/question. I think that the language of choice is more about what framework you're into more than the language itself. If you like front-end development, it's likely to be JavaScript or TypeScript in conjunction with Angular, React or Vue.

For me, I primarily write in C# because I came up through the .NET community, however, have done a lot of work in node.js which is not a language obviously but I find that you cannot do web development and NOT have JavaScript in your wheelhouse.

C# allows me to do - console apps, API development, serverless, web front-end apps, mobile using Xamarin, IoT and even runs on a Raspberry PI. But I can just as easily turn to JavaScript and do most if not all of those as well with node.js or Angular.

Depends on the project or what the team I am working with is using. .NET Core right now is where I live 80% of the time.

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Thalles Henrique

Java. But I have interest to learn Swift, but I guess I'm having troubles with this because I don't know much about functional programming (I only know to code using the Object-oriented paradigm). I tried to learn this programming language using the demonstration project of the Apple's development page, but I continue with some doubts in some aspects of it, such as the guard-lets and the way which Swift use the MVC-Pattern. Currently, I'm programming in Python (with Django framework) too.

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Jan Wedel

I‘m also a Java dev and I code some iOS apps in my spare time. So I’m wondering you are having troubles with Swift? It’s as function (or not functional) as Java. Why are you having trouble with it?

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Thalles Henrique

I always get confused with ViewControllers (put the code of one in another, because of the name) and find the "guard lets" very complicated. I'm more used to programming using very much comparisons and tried to implement the demonstration project in Apple's site, and I haven't studied anything of the language before starting, which I guess wasn't a good idea. I understood the basics but some functions are a little bit obscure for me.

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Flavio • Edited

learn programming in c# and .NET (a lit of java) , but i really like js , i did web pages , services , apps and bots using node and using vanilla js for front; saddly now i use cobol in my new job :(

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Donald Merand • Edited

I work in education, and I use Ruby as my go-to platform for web apps and system scripting. It's stable, performant at my scale, and the code is beautiful.

When I want to write a truly bulletproof server/daemon I've been leaning toward Elixir. When I want to write front-end apps that go beyond Neapolitan JavaScript, I use Elm. I'm very happy with this set of tools!

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Thomas Leathers

Python is my main one, with most of my work in it involving pygame somehow. What I work on tends to range from simpler hardcoded games, to entire game engines like Desutezeoid, my point and click adventure engine.

and while I started using both python and pygame for games, I didn't stop at that. General pygame frameworks and applications are also something I work on. libraries such as strazoloidwm, a project of mine that helps create multi-window UIs in pygame.

Some of my bigger projects include a Chiptune synthesizer suite complete with drum sequencer, a base 3 computer emulator (SBTCVM), and my latest project being a gopherspace client called Zoxenpher.

python wasn't my first language, but it does what I need it to, and I've gotten to the point where I know what to expect from it. part of my reasoning for using a library like pygame is that I do enjoy the challenge of writing my own UI code from scratch, and fine-tuning it to the task at hand. :)