

The programming language that is fastest to implement features - deltrem

Slashdot said that programming has a political axis with conservative and liberal programmers. Liberal programmers worry about how fast you take to implement a feature. Liberal programmers need the answer to this question. (1)<p>Paul Graham said that his company could implement features faster than his competitors, because his company programmed in Common Lisp and Common Lisp makes you twice more productive as a programmer. (2)<p>Time passes, progress happens, Common Lisp <i>was</i> the fastest, a more modern programming language <i>is</i> the fastest, so <i>today</i> what programming language is the fastest to implement features? Why?<p>(1) http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=political+axis
(2) http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
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gyardley
Must we use this 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' language for programming styles?
The terms are already so ridiculously value-laden, you're at risk of letting
your political leanings involuntarily bleed through and muddle up your
programming decisions.

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27182818284
I think that's a reaction to there being a blog post about liberal and
conservative programming languaged on the HN page a bit ago.

(And yes, we should absolutely not use them. )

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lumberjack
There is no objective way to answer this. You are probably talking about rapid
prototyping languages. The most popular ones in use today are Python and
possibly Java (?). Dialects of Lisp have a strong tradition of being good
rapid prototyping languages and there is potential in languages like Haskell.
I'm obviously talking about general purpose languages here and therein lies
the problem. Different languages have different resources, different
communities and perform better at different tasks. It not possible to go in
more detail. However this is not a question that you should be asking yourself
because the answer will come naturally with time. Try to experience and learn
as much and with time you'll have a preference for a language when you just
want to hack something together. That's your answer.

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codeonfire
Productivity depends way more on the programmer and his/her knowledge of the
common idioms, language features, and libraries for any particular platform
than any specific language. The characteristics of languages that make it fast
to implement features include dynamic typing, built-in collections, a large
class library, availability of an interactive console, availability of a
debugger that can easily be used on any host machine, JIT compiled or
interpreted, no binaries or packages to build.

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GFischer
If you want a quick and dirty CRUD app, GeneXus is probably up there:

<http://www.genexus.com/global/home?en>

It's a code generation tool that's mainly popular in South America and is
making some inroads in Japan and Europe.

It does generate some ugly code, and ugly-looking applications, but it
generates all the backend code and can generate to iOS and Android too.

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_delirium
It sounds like you might be asking about what's often called "rapid
prototyping". That doesn't cover every possible case (e.g. adding a new
feature to a large existing system is not usually covered by "rapid
prototyping"), but I think it points to the languages that tend to emphasize
ease-of-getting-something-out. Python and Ruby are often promoted in that
category. Delphi used to be big, but is waning.

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hasenj
If you're new to common lisp, it will take you 10x longer to implement the
feature you want than if you use technologies you're more familiar with.

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thiagodotfm
Ruby on Rails.

