Ask HN: Do you program in a language that you feel indifferent towards?

While I learned Java in college it has never been my language of choice.

For the last 8+ years I have written mostly in Java, professionally. I'd much rather write Python or C#, but I have to work in Java, at least for now.

Python. It mostly stays out of my way. I guess I like that about it but I’m definitely not a “Pythonista”.

That’s more-or-less how I feel about Python, it’s a solid language, first one I learned and only one used outside some C++ for school, for several years. But, after branching off into other languages, I’m just really not that interested in Python. Maybe it’s because I’m not particularly interested in ML or data science, which outside of it almost being the ubiquitous intro language, is really the big draw to it these days. I just don’t find Python sexy, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not as fun to use, which can also be a good thing as it can prevent some shitty hacks just because I wanted to code golf/try some obscure language features.

Though, I’m a bit of a language junky, I love playing with new languages that largely break away from the classic C Style. My daily languages I use, and actually deeply enjoy working with are Ruby, JS/TS (mostly TS now-a-days), and Elixir. Likely Haskell is the next language I’ll try to seriously learn, as it’s one I just want to check off my list. But, I’ve also dabbled around with rust, tried to drink the lisp koolaid, but couldn’t get past the (((())))))) - I hope one day to try again to see what the hype is about, and I occasionally check up on Idris, but I’m going to let that one mature a bit more/at least get Haskell under my belt before I give it a serious effort.

With all that said, Python is solid, but with all the other options out there, it just seems terribly boring. Maybe that’s largely due to my lack of meaningful work with it in the past few years, but I’m not at all interested in using it anymore. Also, the whole white space thing is a huge turn off, Which is one of the things I actually used to really like about it.

PHP basically. It's a blunt weapon, simple yet effective. And while using it, it's a lot like using a hammer. There's no emotion, which is not a bad thing.

Something like Kotlin, on the other hand, is so pleasurable that people often make up projects to have a reason to use it. Which is not necessarily a good thing.

Yes. I feel indifferent about all programming languages. I don't understand emotional attachments or reactions to programming languages.

I had grown to dislike programming in Java over the years but once Java 8 was released it became tolerable again. I vastly prefer Kotlin these days.

The JVM is still my go to for any project. Go and especially Go 2 seem interesting but there's basically zero chance I'd be able to use it at work so... meh.

No feelings is a fine situation. Languages are just a tool.

But some tools are more powerful and/or easier to use.

Using R for work at the moment - what a mess. So many exceptions, silent errors, unexpected behaviour, special cases, 3 object-oriented systems in a non object-oriented language - each of them slightly different; lazy vs non-lazy evaluation, 3 different types of data frames - similar to each other (but not quite the same) and you can use the same operations and packages on some of them, but not always; the same algorithms implemented in different packages with a similar but slightly different syntax... and so on.

Many tools/languages that have a difficult learning curve also provide a significant payoff/increase in productivity when you master the tool. R is nothing like this. Learning all of the strange features just brings you up to a level where you can write code have it do what you expect it would do.