alt Hacker NewsWhat are some examples of batteries-included languages that folk around here really feel productive in and/or love? What makes them so great, in your opinion?
(Leaving aside thoughts on language syntax, compile times, tooling etc - just interested in people's experiences with / thoughts on healthy stdlibs)
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These are the big ones I use, specifically because of the standard libraries:
Python (decent standard library) - It's pretty much everywhere. There's so many hidden gems in that standard library (difflib, argparse, shlex, subprocess, cmd)
C#/F# (.NET)
C# feels so productive because of how much is available in .NET Core, and F# gets to tag along and get it all for free too. With C# you can compile executables down to bundle the runtime and strip it down so your executables are in the 15 MiB range. If you have dotnet installed, you can run F# as scripts.
I work in a NIS2 compliance sector, and we basically use Go and Python for everything. Go is awesome, Python isn't as such. Go didn't always come with the awesome stllib that it does today, which is likely partly why a lot of people still use things like Gin for web frameworks rather than simply using the standard library. Having worked with a lot of web frameworks, the one Go comes with is nice and easy enough to extend. Python is terrible, but on the plus side it's relatively easy to write your own libraries with Python, and use C/Zig to do so if you need it. The biggest challenges for us is that we aren't going to write a better MSSQL driver than Microsoft, so we use quite a bit of dependencies from them since we are married with Azure. These live in a little more isolation than what you might expect, so they aren't updated quite as often as many places might. Still, it's a relatively low risk factor that we can accept.
Our React projects are the contrast. They live in total and complete isolation, both in development and in production. You're not going to work on React on a computer that will be connected to any sort of internal resources. We've also had to write a novel's worth of legal bullshit explaining how we can't realistically review every line of code from React dependencies for compliance.
Anyway, I don't think JS/TS is that bad. It has a lot of issues, but then, you could always have written your own wrapper ontop of Node's fetch instead of using Axios. Which I guess is where working in the NIS2 compliance sector makes things a little bit different, because we'd always chose to write the wrapper instead of using one others made. With the few exceptions for Microsoft products that I mentioned earlier.