The Slant on Programming Languages


So…

What are the “best” (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?

Slant apparently has the answer. But it’s an ever-changing list. As of August 1, 2017, the “best” languages are:

  1. Smalltalk
  2. Python
  3. D
  4. Common Lisp
  5. Rust
  6. Haskell
  7. Dart
  8. Scheme
  9. Ceylon
  10. Elixir

Slant is a product recommendation community with the goal of making it effortless to find the best product, app or game for you. No more spending hours doing product research with tabs full of forums and reviews.

You can’t argue with the wisdom of the crowd. 😄

Smalltalk is #1, an unexpected and surprising result. As I frequently blog, Smalltalk is a supremely productive, beautifully elegant language. And while it’s not particularly popular at the moment, it is most certainly time-tested, as Smalltalk has been commercially used for over three decades by enterprises around the globe, including the likes of JPMorgan, Desjardins, UBS, Florida Power & Light, Texas Instruments, Telecom Argentina, Orient Overseas Container Lines, Siemens AG, ALLSTOCKER, and so on.

In fact, in the early 2000s Smalltalk was used by the U.S. joint military to write a million-line battle simulation program called JWARS. It actually outperformed a similar simulation called STORM written in C++ by the U.S. Air Force. That by itself is an astonishing testament to the capabilities of the language.

Smalltalk has proven itself again and again over the decades. It certainly deserves its top recommendation at Slant.

Richard Kenneth Eng

Written by

Mr. Smalltalk: https://medium.com/p/domo-arigato-mr-smalltalk-aa84e245beb9

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