In this weekly roundup, we highlight what we believe to be the most thoughtful, helpful, and/or interesting discussion over the past week! Though we are strong believers in healthy and respectful debate, we typically try to choose discussions that are positive and avoid those that are overly contentious.

Any folks whose articles we feature here will be rewarded with our Discussion of the Week badge. ✨

Now that y'all understand the flow, let's go! 🏃💨

The Discussion of the Week

This week we're spotlighting @kaamkiya's fun and interesting discussion titled "What is the most fun coding language?"

What is the most fun coding language?

Kaamkiya ・ Nov 27 '23

#discuss #healthydebate

Kaamkiya's prompt is such a great one for getting folks to open up about their interests. Not only that, but it can be quite helpful to a newbie, providing them a window into other's preferences, so they might get a sense of what different programming languages are like.

Like a lotta the best discussion posts out there, the focus is really on the comments sections. There are lots of different folks chiming in with their faves — MiniScript, JS, Ruby, Rust, Lisp, Closure, Python... the list goes on.

It's cool to hear folks' reasonings and breakdowns too. For instance, shoutout to @sedwin97 for this thorough and interesting (thoroughly interesting) take on Perl:

Sedwin97 • Nov 29 '23

Perl can be a very fun language. It gives you the ability to do so much that you can write some really cool code that other languages would never allow. That being said, the fact that Perl does that is also why it is the most hated language. I enjoyed it for a little while but I got really sick of it as I wrote more complex scripts.

Just to highlight my point, in Perl's own documentation it says

...Perl always gives you enough rope to hang yourself with if you ask for it

You can make some really cool knots with that rope but you could end up with that knot around your own neck.

And sometimes you don't know that the rope is around your neck as this person stated

Perl idea of freedom is to give you enough rope to hang yourself, if you are tempted to. But sometimes I got paranoid feeling that there is enough rope around my neck, and I cannot feel it ... yet, but rope is still there. Sometimes I am making decisions without fully understanding the price I just agreed to pay.

There's always time to hop in and make the case for whatever you think is the most fun programming. Don't be shy, get in there and share your thoughts! 🗣

What are your picks?

The DEV Community is particularly special because of the kind, thoughtful, helpful, and entertaining discussions happening between community members. As such, we want to encourage folks to participate in discussions and reward those who are initiating or taking part in conversations across the community. After all, a community is made possible by the people interacting inside it.

There are loads of great discussions floating about in this community. This is just the one we chose to highlight. 🙂

I urge you all to share your favorite discussion of the past week below in the comments. And if you're up for it, give the author an @mention — it'll probably make 'em feel good. 💚