Question

What (in your opinion) is the best programming language?

Answer 1

there aren't such

Answer 2

what?

Answer 3

there is not best language
it depends what you need to do

Answer 4

ok, let me rephrase it... what (in your opinion) is the most useful language?

Answer 5

and also, what (also in your opinion) is the beast OS for programming, or is there such a thing?

Answer 6

what do you mean best OS for programming?

Answer 7

like is there a OS that is better suited for programming?

Answer 8

they say Unix is both an OS and an IDE

Answer 9

maybe unix but it also depends on what you do

Answer 10

there is no best programming language

Answer 11

This is more of a religious discussion...Like which editor is best....
But I will give it a shot....

For embedded programming C has been the default language of choice (though this is eroding)
For Web programming Java and php and Javascript have been used mostly (though ruby is gaining ground)

For scripting languages Perl, Python ( but Python with Pygame does some nice gui work)

And these are just opinions...so be gentle when you reply :)

Answer 12

for building compilers from scratch, you might try something like Standard ML or OCaml

Answer 13

and for iOS development, you will want to use Objective-C

Answer 14

If you're working with games, then C++ is usually a must.

For crunching matrices, Fortran or MATLAB is usually used

Answer 15

It's like asking whether vanilla is better than strawberry ice cream, or whether sports cars are better than pickup trucks.
If you do lots of hauling big stuff, a pickup truck is better. If you like to speed or go to the race track, a sports car is.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each language. C/C++ have the advantage of being quite predictable in terms of the compiler output and the expected performance. It's relatively easy to judge the performance of C/C++ source code, and find ways to optimize it. It's also out of all probably the most flexible language in terms of being able to support a wide variety of coding styles and being able to very easily build complex frameworks. It has the disadvantage of giving you lots of rope to hang yourself with (all that flexibility comes at the price of various pitfalls and needing to know language specifics to reach the best performance and to keep code maintainable).
Python, for example, is almost the diametric opposite. Being primarily an interpreted language, It's relatively slow and can be extremely difficult to predict and judge in terms of performance. It's a relatively finicky to edit because indentation is part of the language syntax. On the other hand, it's trivial to write small programs in python very very quickly, and almost perfectly suited to data munging code like file format ex- and importers or to prototyping particular algorithms.
Similar pluses and minuses apply to all other programming languages. It depends on what project you plan on using a particular language for, what you expect (maximum performance, easiest readability, quickest iteration), and also very much on personal preference.

Answer 16

The best programming language is the one that you know how to use the best (or the one which is installed already)

Answer 17

lol installing is no problem