If you had to choose one programming language that you had to use for the rest of your life, what would it be?

hades@lemm.ee to Programming@programming.dev – 100 points –
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Scala. Expressive, concise, can scale from simple to sophisticated. Sufficiently powerful - has metaprogramming, advanced types. Runs on a world-class runtime and takes advantage of a huge, mature package ecosystem that isn’t going anywhere.

Seconded. The metaprogramming aspect of Scala is getting better and better.

"Sufficiently powerful" is a bit of an understatement when it comes to Scala. Honestly may have a bit too many features for my taste, it's not a small language

Actually the language is quite small. The features, it has, are just quite powerful and have huge synergies so that it seems that you have a lot of complex features. It has a lot of weird corner case stuff, but most of that is because of the jvm and other languages have that too unfortunately.

That's a good point about the synergies, something like eg. a type system that's expressive enough to be Turing-complete is going to have some effects. You're right that it might just feel like a "kitchen sink language" due to complexity of the features it has, but then again I suppose it's sort of one and the same where a language's complexity comes from.

But it's no Swift, at least; now that language really does have everything and the kitchen sink.