My Favorite Languages

My favorite languages, in order:

1. MatLab - MatLab is just a beautiful language. It is simple but very powerful and makes it easy to do very complex things. While the fact that is is designed solely for numeric computation is a drawback as far as using it for other things, that is one of the reasons I love it.
2. Python - Python is by far my favorite scripting language. It is very powerful with a lot of features, but that also makes it a bit complex. It isn't as elegant as MatLab, but it is way more useful.
3. R - I consider R to be somewhere in between MatLab and Python. It is optimized for numerical computing, but can also be used with text and character data. For statistics it stands alone - Python can do pretty much anything R can do, but R is simpler and easier. However, it is more a functional language than a programming language.
4. SQL - I've worked with MySQL for almost 20 years and I know SQL very well. It is great at working with normalized data, however as storage costs have gone down and RAM has gone up, I'm not sure normalizing data really makes all that much sense these days. Having to join a bunch of tables can really impact performance, which when you just need to get a string out of a joined table doesn't really seem worth it. For web sites it makes sense, but for computational purposes I'm not sure it's really necessary, unless you have more data than you can fit in memory. However I will always remember SQL as my first love.
5. C - I used C in university, but not much since then. I have forgotten most of what I once knew, but I plan on learning C again because of it's speed and efficiency. The fact that you can use C to write extensions for R, Python, MatLab etc makes it very useful.
6. PHP - PHP is a reallly ugly language. It has a lot of features, but is inconsistent in syntax and not designed for manipulating data. It's main advantage is that it is easy to learn, but this also makes it very easy to do badly. PHP can be done very well, but good PHP programmers are few and far between and they seem to be getting crowded out by mediocre programmers.
7. Javascript - Javascript has really been maturing recently. I started using Javascript back in 1996 or so, when all it could really do was alerts and confirmations, it can do a whole lot more than that these days. I have not yet worked with Node.js so I am not all that familiar with the full power of it. I don't really know what my problem with Javascript is. Maybe I still see it as the silly little language it was when I first learned it. Anyway the fact that it is on the bottom of my list should in no way be taken as a reflection of its value.

Etiketten: coding, data_science