Ask HN: Favorite Languages And Frameworks And Why
Be partial, be biased, wave the pom poms. What features absolutely rock about your favorite tools and make others look primitive by comparison? Bonus points for obscure choices :)
Ruby192 Rails3
CoffeeScript Backbone.js jQuery qUnit Underscore.js
I'd like to do MMO games in js, i'll use Node.js server side maybe with ZeroMQ, and client side it's still a eyes-wide-open https://gist.github.com/749734 , all via CoffeeScript.
As to JavaScript, I think it is an end game programming language like C. We are not going to get rid of it for a _VERY_ long time. Fortunately, it has closures so I don't really care.
Any language that doesn't sport closures are simply put inferior.
I also like OCaml plus my libevent2 wrapper node.ocaml which is handy ( https://github.com/mathgladiator/node.ocaml )
The macro stepper and the syntax-parse framework presented by Ryan Culpepper this year is something that would make any macro writers jaw drop.
Reference:
http://docs.racket-lang.org/syntax/stxparse.html?q=syntax-pa...
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/dissertation-culpepper.pd... [PDF]
It's great for making simple apps that don't need the complexity of Rails.
Kohana is my favorite PHP framework. It is very similar to Rails and makes working with PHP very pleasant.
Room for improvement: SEO-wise there is room for making URLs look a bit less ugly.