Short summary

[Tomaaz]

As some of you may remember, trying and testing different programming languages was what interested me the most for last couple of years. This has come to an end, now. During my "research" I have tried Blassic, Yabasic, SdlBasic, FreeBasic, BaCon, PureBasic, EGSL, NaaLaa, Lua, Python, Ruby, Julia, Euphoria, Pike, Newlisp, Ring, Tcl, PHP, JavaScript, Processing, QB64, Nim, FreePascal, Go and probably something else (what I don't remember at the moment). I have also stopped doing any web development and, at the moment, programming is 100% hobby for me (before, it was 90% hobby and 10% business ). After trying all the languages from Blassic to Go, I have decided to stick with three of them. The first one is Python, because it's an overall winner. It's easy, well documented with massive community. The second one is Ruby, cause it's my personal favourite (love the syntax!). The third is BaCon. It's the best BASIC dialect, IMHO. Why? It perfectly combines the old with the new. It really feels like BASIC, but you can do modern things with it.

I'm pretty sure that majority of users here are not interested either in these languages or in my opinion about them, but if anyone would like to discuss any of them, I'm happy to take part in such a discussion.

EDIT Wow, I forgot about Perl. Also, I should have put Ruby as the first one and Python as the second.

[Richly]

Tomaaz, why is Lua not in your top 3?

[Tomaaz]

Lua is on 4th place. For playing with simple examples Lua is as nice as Ruby. The problems start when you're tying to use it for something more complex. Of course, the reason for that is the fact that Lua is meant to be a small embeddable language and is not designed for the same purposes Python or Ruby are. Also, many libraries for Lua have been abandoned and don't work with newer versions of Lua. However, if I was interested in 2d games development, I would choose LOVE without a doubt. It's extremely easy to learn and use, has solid user base and it's in active development. Plus it has an Android version.

[Tomaaz]

I think I should say something about Pike, cause it's a very interesting language. Pike is the most underrated of all languages I've tried. It seems to be very serious, very well designed language that ships with many useful libraries by default. The biggest problem with it is the documentation and lack of examples. It looks like several years ago Pike was a promising language that could have become a competition for Ruby, Python, PHP but, for some reasons (not known to me) hasn't.

[ScriptBasic]

I'm surprised you haven't tried Script BASIC. Peter was a huge fan and wrote a few extension modules for it. BaCon is almost a mirror of SB's syntax.

[Tomaaz]

I'm surprised you haven't tried Script BASIC.

I have, of course. I just forgot to mention it here. You should remember our long discussion about it.

Peter was a huge fan and wrote a few extension modules for it.

"Was"... Interesting.

BaCon is almost a mirror of SB's syntax.

Well, they are both based on BASIC, so it's not a surprise for me. But BaCon is still in development, has very good documentation and many extremely easy to use libraries.

[ScriptBasic]

"Was"... Interesting.

Peter's motivation for writing BaCon was he wanted a 64 bit Linux/Unix BASIC. It wasn't until he was far along with BaCon that the realization all that was needed with Script BASIC to be 64 bit was a compiler flag change. (-m64) If It wasn't for Peter's interest in Script BASIC in the beginning, I probably wouldn't have picked up the project and who knows where it might of ended up.

[Tomaaz]

Peter's motivation for writing BaCon was he wanted a 64 bit Linux/Unix BASIC.

It was something different:

The only BASIC I had used since was ScriptBasic. This is a very good BASIC but has the downside of being interpreted and therefore inevitably slow, with eventually visible source code to read for everybody.
...
Still I wanted to create my own BASIC, and for performance reasons it had to be a compiler, also having the possibility of hidden source code.

The whole text is here.

[Richly]

Tomaaz, where does Perl fit in your list?

[jj2007]

Tomaaz, how dare you not give MasmBasic the place in the top three it truely deserves??
 

[Tomaaz]

Tomaaz, where does Perl fit in your list?

Perl is pretty solid. You can do a lot with it. Also, while Ruby and Python are more usable under Linux (Ruby is almost unusable on Windows), Perl seems to work really good under Windows (at least it did on Win 7). I was using Strawberry Perl and managed to do everything I did with Perl on Linux. Perl is well documented, but the community is a bit geeky. The obvious bad thing about Perl is its syntax. Sometimes it looks really ugly and is annoying to write (sigils,single and double arrows etc.). Of course, I'm talking about Perl 5. Perl 6, that has finally arrived last year, is, despite its name, a completely different language. I've tried it but didn't play with it to much. It was surprisingly slow and even more complex than Perl 5. I know that "TimTowTdi" is one of the most important aspect of Perl philosophy, but it was just to much.

Tomaaz, how dare you not give MasmBasic the place in the top three it truely deserves??
 

If I only were able to understand and use it, I'm pretty sure it would be on the very top.

[Aurel]

while Ruby and Python are more usable under Linux

ohh finally something true of your expert view..
and for your under 100 lines progies   almost any programming language is usable
ah yes python ..ok WinPython is not that bad but simply still sucks on Windows 

[Tomaaz]

ohh finally something true of your expert view..

Finally? I've said it before. Many times.

and for your under 100 lines progies   almost any programming language is usable

Well... Unfortunately, not.  Even for some 10 lines "progies" some languages are pretty useless. 

ah yes python ..ok WinPython is not that bad but simply still sucks on Windows 

The "what's in the name" saga continues.  Aurel, I know that this distribution has "Win" in its name, but...  And does anyone care what's the best on Windows anymore? Everybody is moving to mobile platforms and Microsoft will soon block everything but its own solutions, so... 

[ScriptBasic]

I wonder if BaCon would be more popular if a Windows effort was taken seriously.

[Aurel]

Everybody is moving to mobile platforms and Microsoft will soon block everything but its own solutions, so

Yeah...who is everybody 
you? 
MS block in the past so many things but are unblocked by hackers ...
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