languages of choice

languages of choice

C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, andmost good ones are fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog arealso popular in small but influential communities.

There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackerswith Fortran, or even assembler, as their language of choice.They often prefer to be known as Real Programmers, and otherhackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel").Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting orappropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, anda few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systemsprograms. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche in scientificprogramming.

Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal andAda, which don't give them the near-total freedom considerednecessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language),and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOLor other traditional card walloper languages as a total andunmitigated loss.