languages of choice
C and Lisp. Nearly every hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are
fluent in both. Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential
communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with Fortran, or
even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as
Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of
Mel"). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate
for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and
hardware-specific uses in systems programs. Fortran occupies a shrinking niche
in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't give
them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see
bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely
connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total and
unmitigated loss.
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification «
Language Sensitive Editor « language-sensitive
editor « languages of choice » Laning and
Zierler » Lan Kanal Adapter » LANL
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