C#. Comes with a first-class dev and debugging experience, a HUGE first-party BCL, cross-platform application support, and one of the best webserver frameworks out there.

TypeScript makes a reasonably-close second, not necessarily because it’s great, but because of how effective it is at making JavaScript usable.

Rust by a big margin.

I’ll just say it: PHP. I mean the language itself is not really pretty (but came a long way).

But I’ve got a nice side gig running where I help small businesses and schools to keep their old PHP based websites running and secure until they can afford a new system. In that area money is often very tight and there are no “content managers” but a few people maintaining content with next to no technological knowledge and in their spare time. So changing systems is a hard task. Being the really decently priced guy who keeps their PHP ship afloat is pretty rewarding (not really monetarily but personally).

So working with PHP I have a very nice group of customers who are grateful for every bit of help. I love that.

Depends on the task

C#

F# is also nice, but I don’t use it very often

Oddly enough Java. If you weren’t brainwashed to write the “enterprise Java”, it’s surprisingly succinct. More so than Go, whose forced “simplicity” ended up making it more verbose.

Scala 😀

Elm (for frontend). https://elm-lang.org/

Nothing is as easy to refactor, maintain, add new features to, work with after a gap, nothing else is as crashless and rock solid.

No compiler is a fast, friendly, helpful and insightful. Seriously. You don’t wait for the compiler. It’s instant even on huge code bases. And the resulting output outperforms other major frameworks.

Its syntax is weird at first (even stranger than python) and the autoformatter is mad keen on blank lines but after a while it’s just so clear and easy to follow.

You have to let go of your object oriented mindset and stop trying to turn everything into objects and components but everything I hated about maintaining old code evaporated once I did. I used to believe that objects detangled code, I don’t know why I continued to believe that despite the evidence, because apart from pretty small and simple things, OO code gets extremely tangled. Elm is absurdly easy to refractor, so you just do.

It’s genuinely nice to add new features to old code, something I’ve never experienced before in a few decades of programming.

The elm slack is also a very helpful place indeed and you usually get a lot of support pretty quickly.

Adding the link to their front page, I see they call it “A delightful language for reliable web applications” and the first claim is “no runtime exceptions”. I remember thinking that was marketing BS but being intrigued by the bold claim. A few years later and I can honestly say that that accurately describes my experience.

These last few years I’ve rediscovered the joy of coding.

Clojure. It’s just fun to write.

Firstly, it’s functional and “Lispy”. My code is super expressive. Writing code is like writing prose where I can choose a word (function) from a large vocabulary [1]. I can focus on high-level concepts and modifying states instead of fighting with low-level logic.

Secondly, it runs on JVM - an already robust and performant platform.

And there are so many good things that I cannot simply write in some words. The father of Clojure, Rich Hickey, is a genius in expressing Clojure’s design. You should check out some of his talks [2].

Too bad that Clojure is too “niche” that I haven’t got a chance to make a living by writing Clojure, yet. But learning it is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my career. Yes, it’s that good.

[1] https://clojuredocs.org/

[2] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

C++, I am a library developer with some embedded experience. I can easily interface with c libs and expose my lib with a c interface. With clang, static analysis catches most bugs before runtime. Everything I write can be compiled nearly anywhere with very little dependencies required. Excellent IDE and LSP support with a ton of documentation on the language features available (admittedly, there are a lot). The standard library is gigantic, useful, and well documented. It is used everywhere, so resources and example source code in C++ are very easy to come by. Project configuration (via CMake) is extremely powerful and expressive (though not technically C++).

Some languages have some of the elements I listed, but no other language has them all.

Java. I’ll be the one to say it.

Probably Typescript, it has so many quality of life features that I miss when I’m using anything else. A close second is C#, Kotlin third.

Rust when performance really matters.

PowerShell when scripting and automating stuff. It’s common to hate it because “microsoft bad” but it’s very logical and it feels modern. Funnily enough, I’ve only used it on Mac and Linux.

Rust and Zig are currently my favorite languages.

Racket but I’ll take Guile Scheme as a close second. Then Hy, a lisp dialect of Python. I’m writing a blog written in a DSL of Racket right now, Pollen, that makes authoring a joyful experience. Hy gives me access to the entire Python ecosystem plus access to things like macros. Guile Scheme is the configuration language of the Linux distribution, Guix System. Guile’s G-Expressions are so powerful for writing packages.

C# is my happy place. Started doing python more over bash scripts for complicated stuff and I like it. I mostly use Java for work and my opinion of it depends on the how much extra effort I had to spend doing something I could have done in C# in a few minutes. Otherwise it has some nice features and project Panama has been a game changer.