What's a good general-purpose programming language?

There are a number of good, general purpose languages. What we seem to have less of is good, general purpose developers and good, general purpose <i>and stable</i> libraries. I have always been frustrated having to debug my tools as well as my project, and I would think others feel the same. Let’s try to stop inventing new wheels and refine those we already have.

I think people are confusing this link with ASK HN

The answer vastly depends on what general purpose you&#x27;re after.<p>- General purpose windows? c#<p>- General purpose web? Javascript<p>- General purpose IOT? c++<p>The problem is general purpose doesn&#x27;t work anymore? Not for at least 15 years.

Define “general-purpose”. All languages have limitations on what it can be used for out of the box (unless it can be cross-compiled into a different language as needed).<p>Define “good”. Good for what? Do you mean productive? Productive for whom? Do you mean “I like it”? In what environment?<p>Different developers like different languages. For example, some developers love explicit types. Others don’t.<p>In other words, there is a reason why we have many different languages and development environments. The same reason that explains why we will always and forever have new languages, frameworks, libraries etc. solving the <i>same</i> problem in a new different way.<p>That of course doesn’t stop developers from trying every day to come up with a “one-size-fits-all” language&#x2F;framework&#x2F;library&#x2F;architecture that will solve all problems for all developers in all situations. It will never happen of course. But it sure is fun to see the language&#x2F;framework&#x2F;library&#x2F;architecture wars from the side line. Bring popcorn! :)

javascript&#x2F;nodejs. I had been using Matlab ~15 yrs until I left the institution that was paying for it. I looked around and js&#x2F;node was the clear winner. NodeJS was being continually improved with faster engines, the browser as the default GUI for any app I could create, Node can access to C libraries directly. So though I didn&#x27;t know it at the time, I became full stack dev. And that is on top of my real job of engineer&#x2F;data scientist. Unlike a lot of my colleagues who know only python&#x2F;Fortran&#x2F;C&#x2F;C++ I&#x27;m comfortable putting together a server to crunch the numbers, tap in to a dB, and serve it all to a GUI of my own design if need be. JS&#x2F;Node is not easy but it is the most flexible language ... oh, and you&#x27;ll never be out of work even if that&#x27;s the only language you know.

Maybe the programmers would be better off using a dangerous language and blowing their legs off a couple of times. This cult-of-the-compiler mentality is starting to become tiresome. It’s not very good for productivity either.