Ask HN: What is the “most powerful” language in 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the “most powerful” language in 2023

3 pointsdinkleberg5 comments

Yesterday I was reading pg’s Hackers and Painters and was intrigued by his idea that one of the things that gave them a distinct advantage at ViaWeb was their use of lisp which allowed them to work faster and do more than their competition who were using worse languages. And he points to macros as a significant advantage.

He also in one chapter points out that the “there is no such thing as a better language” idea is clearly false. I think this is true. We have a lot of better languages now, and most are good enough. We get to make the decisions based on trade offs with things like ease of learning, depth of capabilities, etc.

I don’t want to start any flame wars, but I’m very curious to hear what people think are the most powerful languages today?

Or in other words, what language would you use as your secret weapon?

As I was thinking through it, my choices were Rust and Elixir (depending on the type of dev work you’re doing).

Rust seems to have the best combination of breadth of capabilities along with developer experience. And it is very fast. But it is also lower level.

Elixir on the other hand is higher level, and functional, but also has great DX and a wide array of capabilities.

And both have a strong macro system.

People are gonna hate, but Python.

It’s simply used in so many industries/domains for so many distinct disciplines. Everything from programming robotics, to training AI, to data crunching/analysis, to web development, to desktop and mobile apps, to systems administration, etc.

It’s mature and flexible enough that it’s relied on by some of the biggest companies with overly complex stacks, and it’s simple enough that tiny open source tooling can use it without headaches.

It plays well with others in that building extensions in Rust, C, and others is commonplace.

It doesn’t require much boilerplate (looking at you Java) and you are not locked into a specific coding paradigm. It can be (mostly) functional or completely object oriented. Organizational structures like classes are there if you need them, along with many interpretations of the “pythonic” way to do things. Still if you just need three lines of code to do what you need, that works.

Don’t get me wrong, it has its problems(ahem…a standardized packaging method and a simple means of distributing apps to non-technical users) but in general they are not dealbreakers. Additionally, there are clearly better languages which are well suited for one of the domains listed above, but it’s not simple to find one as useful in such a broad way. Python is generally near the top at most things and best at a few.

Rust and Elixir are both great languages with fantastic tooling, that also compliment each other very well.

Wolfram language.

Ah that’s an interesting one. As far as native capabilities you’re probably right, it has a ridiculous amount of built in functions.

I’m curious, if you use it, do you use it for academic purposes or for industry?

How does one host, version control, and deploy in Wolfram?

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