By: Michael Fiano

Re-posted from: https://mfiano.net/posts/2022-09-04-programming-languages-i-use/index.html

This is a brief follow-up of sorts to my previous article in which I hastily, and in places inaccurately justified my reasons for switching from Common Lisp to Julia as my primary programming language.

I will admit, the previous article was not very well written, was unfair to both languages, and shouldn't have been published in its current form, especially had I known it would have dropped my web server to its knees.

These days, I'm still mostly using Julia, and still stand by my choice to use it as my primary programming language. It satisfies all of my requirements for 90% of the software work I do. I have successfully built a handful of rather sophisticated graphics libraries and visualization tools, so far, and I don't plan to stop using it for the bulk of my work.

That said, I have been re-reaching out to other languages when needed. As an example, for the past month I've been brainstorming a particular end-user application that would be best built in C, Zig, or Rust. I chose the latter, as its what I am most familiar with. So I have a long-term project being written in Rust, a language I have been against for a long time, because it matched a job requirement.

I write more Lua than I care for, as more and more of the tools I use are configured with it. It's definitely not my favorite language, but it gets the job done.

I also am constantly writing lots of both POSIX shell and Bash-specific scripts, if that counts at all.

Last, but not least, there is Common Lisp. There are still projects (albeit pretty low on my priority list) that would benefit the most in this environment, so unless things drastically change before I get to one of those projects, Common Lisp is still on the table for me – it's just not my everyday language, anymore.

Programming languages are just tools. I will just use what gets the job done in the most reliable, responsible, and enjoyable way. I'm going to refrain from zealotry until I'm proven there is a Holy Grail programming language.