C++ and Scheme
Out of context: Reply #4
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- stewdio0
Call me a hater, but do not under any circumstances align yourself with a Microsoft-controlled language. They're a company that wins by having really great business models. Not really great products.
C++ is the speed goldmine. If you need something powerful and fast that's your ticket. Here's openFrameworks which will help you get up and running more smoothly: http://www.openframeworks.cc/ For reference openFrameworks : C++ :: Processing : Java. Also worth noting that just about everything (including OS's) are written in C++. And if you know C++ you can easily migrate to Objective-C which is the native language for Mac OS X and iPhone.
Having said that, I actually prefer functional programming languages. I totally agree with @armsbottomer. If we're going to split hairs I actually prefer Scheme over Lisp (or at least original Lisp) because I think lexical closures are more elegant. (Thank you to JavaScript for teaching me what that means—the original JavaScript interpreter was written in Scheme and JavaScript itself still contains some of that DNA.) But really Scheme is just a subset of Lisp and if you like one you can at least sympathize with the other.
Right now though I'm going wild for Ruby. Not Ruby on Rails, which is fine and all, but actual plain Ruby. I've been mixing some Ruby with OpenGL to do data animation work for clients and writing the code feels like such a cleaner undertaking than I'm used to in Java. (Which has been my mainstay for doing similar work in the past.) I little while back I wrote this quick start guide for getting up and running with Ruby-Processing in under 10 minutes. If you're on OS X give this a try:
http://stewdio.org/blog/2010/03/…I have some friends who are becoming diehard Python fans. I've dabbled with Python and it seems like a great language. But for me, right now at least, I'm all about Ruby.