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Yesterday I was reading pg’s Hackers and Painters and was intrigued by his idea that one of the things that gave them a distinct advantage at ViaWeb was their use of lisp which allowed them to work faster and do more than their competition who were using worse languages. And he points to macros as a significant advantage.

He also in one chapter points out that the “there is no such thing as a better language” idea is clearly false. I think this is true. We have a lot of better languages now, and most are good enough. We get to make the decisions based on trade offs with things like ease of learning, depth of capabilities, etc.

I don’t want to start any flame wars, but I’m very curious to hear what people think are the most powerful languages today?

Or in other words, what language would you use as your secret weapon?

As I was thinking through it, my choices were Rust and Elixir (depending on the type of dev work you’re doing).

Rust seems to have the best combination of breadth of capabilities along with developer experience. And it is very fast. But it is also lower level.

Elixir on the other hand is higher level, and functional, but also has great DX and a wide array of capabilities.

And both have a strong macro system.