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Ask HN: What are some niche features of your go-to programming language?
3 points by CuriousGeorgeQA on July 5, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
After a decade of professional software dev, I've come to realize the importance of choosing the right language for each project (when possible).

For example, I work in C#/.NET if my customer primarily uses Windows. For legacy systems customers I do work in Java. When I'm working in prototypes I'm using Python.

For instance, recently I found Python with Numpy to be incredibly easy API wise to do some least squares computations on some datasets.

I wanted to know what are some intriguing niche features like syntax, libraries or tools that your go-to programming language excels at when compared to others?

My intention with this post is to have some kind of index that if your solving a specific problem one should consider a specific language. Not to ignite language wars etc.



Keyword arguments in function/method calls in Python: not having to remember order of arguments and making more readable code.

  bars = foo2bar(foo=my_foo, cache_service=redis_cache)


And using objects to do the same thing in JS


Seems fairly common in PHP too, depending on the code base you're looking at.


Another thing a different thread reminded me off: linear equation handling in Metafont (and derivatives like Metapost).


Free pascal just handles strings in an amazingly good manner. No need to allocate or free them, and they can hold gigabytes.




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