I recently made a list of the program’s I’ve written that I’d consider my favorites. Then I made a list of the programming languages I had used. I think the result would qualify as a list of my favorite programming languages.
- FORTRAN
- BASIC
- SNOBOL
- Pascal
- C
- Objective-C
- Perl
- Python
I’m pretty sure I’ve written more code over the years in Perl and Python. I’m not sure which would be in the lead at this point.
Two other languages, Smalltalk and LISP, are languages I really enjoy but only in an occasional, recreational sense. I’ve never found either to be useful for anything very practical. However, it’s a joy to write pure object-oriented code in the wondrous Smalltalk-80-based environment of Squeak. Similarly, it’s a thrill to write pure functional programs in LISP, using Racket Scheme.